


Don't Blink (You Might Be Missed)

by anamatics



Series: don't blink (you might be missed) [1]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Crimes & Criminals, Gen, Kidnapping, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2013-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-04 09:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In mid-December Jessica Delhaney, teacher, 27, wife of an NYPD beat cop, goes missing.  A massive manhunt follows, Sherlock and Joan are called in to consult and soon it becomes obvious that nothing about this case is as it seems. A cryptic warning comes from Newgate telling them to be careful, and that the killer has a type.  What they don't know is just how accurate that assessment truly was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. don't blink (you might be missed)

_She never meant to remain at Newgate for as long as she did.  The days are long and grey here and the wind rips through the walls like they’re not there at all and the building is old enough to have a vocabulary all its own.  She sits and listens, her fingers tapping idle stories out along her knee. She’s_ bored. _It’s starting to grow so repetitive that she can feel her mind begin to atrophy with every passing second._

_The first snow falls outside of her cell window. She writes to Sherlock, all morose melancholy in the coming winter cold that she’s sure will drive him mad and plans her next move._

_Or rather, she bides her time.  She’s caught up on ruminating on a certain set of circumstances and details, parsing them out over and over until there’s nothing left to pick apart.  There’s something that she’s missed, there has to be. She’d thought there only one mind like her own in this world._

_She’d obviously miscalculated._

_She hates that she’s made such an error.  This isn’t her idea of fun, but she’s let herself be solved and she doesn’t understand why it was so easy.  She’s always prided herself on being something of an enigma and she cannot fathom how someone who is so different from herself could understand her so well. She sits and thinks, for they won’t let her do much else._

_She’s not allowed paints and her paper is severely limited.  They don’t like her here, they know what she is. Still, though, there is the burden of proof and the Americans simply cannot prove much of anything other than an absolutely justified homicide. She’ll sit and think and probably leave before her time is up.  She’s finding that she rather likes the quiet._

_In the silence of the cell block, she’s drawn out eight potential escape plots (and only three involve inciting a riot – which has endless potential but far more chaos than she cares to accommodate) and three different ways to exonerate herself, all on her lonesome.  None of her organization need involve themselves with her rescue; it will keep them safe from potential repercussions._

_Mostly she draws eyes and lips and sure, steady hands with the stub of a pencil she’s been allowed. She can’t quite capture the whole face of the woman, and finding the perfect sweep of her pencil to capture the visage has become an obsession all its own.  She merits further study._

_And Jamie has nothing but time on her hands these days._

**don’t blink (you might be missed)**

_Jess Delhaney is twenty-seven years old and has been missing for fifteen hours._

The text comes through when she’s halfway through her run, pausing to stretch over the back of a bench and shivering in the winter wind.  Joan’s panting, half-way to feeling exhausted, and her lungs are stinging as she gasps in icy cold December air.  She doesn’t text back, her fingers are numb and she just wants to finish this run and get inside. Detective Bell probably doesn’t have much more than that right now.  Either that or he’s relaying it to the party not currently freezing their ass off enough to respond to his text.

The city in December is a sight to behold.  The only problem is the _people._ There’s a terrible influx of them, like ants marching in steady lines two by two, hurrah all over the streets.  The arteries of the cities are clogged with holiday people, cramming into subway cars and stealing hailed taxis from your spot on the street.  They carry heavy bags and wear truly obnoxious sweaters, and they are ruining the mood that December usually puts Joan into. 

Everything takes longer, and her run is cut short by tourists in garishly bright clothing that don’t seem to understand that people run along these walkways.  They don’t meander slowly and they certainly don’t purposefully try to get in her way as she pushes herself onto the next level. 

She likes the winter, but even one such as herself can admit that this weather is far too cold without a proper coat.  Joan runs in a sweatshirt – anything else would be too hot – and deals with it.  But even she can admit defeat from time to time.  Bass pounds in her ears and she thinks about a missing twenty-seven year old and why on earth they’re getting the case before she’s been gone for forty-eight hours. 

The brownstone is freezing when she gets back, but Sherlock is on his hands and knees in front of the fireplace, balls of newspaper scattered around him and what looks like a birthday party streamer attached to one of his socks.  Joan shrugs and heads upstairs to shower.

She wears two sweaters and her warmest wool socks downstairs and settles herself against an ottoman; book in her lap before now merrily crackling fire.  Sherlock is doing something… creative across from her, and hasn’t acknowledged her presence.  He also hasn’t mentioned Bell’s text.

The book today is on gender and the role it plays in society.  She’d found it buried under a stack of newer books and some old copies of the _Times_ , and had asked Sherlock if he was done with it.  He’d grunted and gone back to whatever his art project of the day.  It involves crepe paper, string, and enough glue that Joan is legitimately worried that he might be getting high on the fumes.  He doesn’t seem bothered by it, and is fiddling with something at the back of his canvas.

“It took you twenty-three minutes longer than usual to get home from your run today, Watson,” Sherlock comments just as Joan is about to get into the chapter on societal pressures on women where she’d left off earlier. There’s what looks like a folded up sheet of paper in the middle of the book, and Joan’s trying to figure out a way to extract it without it attracting Sherlock’s notice.  “Detective Bell has a case for us.”

“There were a ton of people at the park for such a cold day,” Joan says, not bothering to look up.  Sherlock doesn’t usually question her whereabouts, which she likes.  They can both do their own thing if they’re so inclined.  Still, though, it’s nice to know that he noticed a deviation in her routine.  “I thought police don’t usually investigate disappearances until the person’s been missing for two days…” 

“They do when she’s the wife of one of their own,” Sherlock replies.  He’s staring at the book in her hands intently now, but drags his eyes away to gesture to the case file on the ottoman Joan’s using as a backrest. 

Joan sets the book down and turns, new case already in hand and folded-up scrap of paper very much not forgotten.  She has a feeling she knows what it is.  She’s found several like it over the past few weeks.  Letters that she hasn’t quite dared read, all covered with a familiar looping handwriting that can only mean one thing.  She pushes the thought from her mind and tugs the file into her lap. 

Jess Delhaney is a pretty girl, her face is timeless and she works as an elementary school teacher at PS 29 in Cobble Hill.  Joan flips the page over and reads the notes on the second page.  “She never came home from the gym?”

“It would appear that way, yes,” Sherlock says.  His fingers are red with the dye from the crepe paper now, and he’s mashing it into thin lines and arranging it very neatly on his canvas.  From this angle it looks almost like a topographical map of some sort but Joan’s sure that it can’t be that easy.  It never is with Sherlock. 

The question bubbles up from within her and she’s asking it before she can think about what a terribly jaded person it makes her sound like.  “And there’s not a chance that she didn’t pick up some gym buddy and is currently holed up in some motel with him?”

“Or her,” Sherlock corrects.  He sits back, and there’s a bit of crepe paper in his hair now too.  Joan stifles a smile and looks back down into the file.  He’s seen that about her too, even if she’s pretty sure that she’s done nothing to indicate it.  “While I wouldn’t rule it out just yet, I think that Ms. Delhaney was probably not having an affair.”

Joan continues to read the notes and realizes that Sherlock probably does have a point.  While cheating is usually the oldest reason in the book for unexplained disappearances like this one, it doesn’t seem to fit.  At least not immediately.  “So do we have Mr. Delhaney-” Joan flips the page over and sees a paper clipped picture of Yan Ling, her husband. “Excuse me, Mr. Ling’s statement?”

“He has the most airtight alibi there is.  He was sitting in the middle of a deposition with three state’s attorneys, the DA and Captain Gregson at the time of her disappearance,” Sherlock pops to his feet and surveys his glue and crepe paper mess for a moment before wandering off towards the kitchen.  Joan looks over the file one last time before getting to her feet and peering at the canvas on the floor.

“Is this… Newgate?” she asks.

Sherlock reappears carrying a sponge and some paper towels.  Joan scoots out of the way as he scrubs away the glue and bright red dye that’s gotten everywhere.  She gingerly lifts his masterpiece onto last week’s copy of the _Times_ that’s still sitting half read on the ottoman behind her.  “It would appear that way, yes,” Sherlock replies curtly.  Joan sits back, knowing that he doesn’t want to discuss it further.  There’re only a few reasons he could be thinking about Newgate, and none of them are good.  She resolves to keep a close eye on him for the next few days, and hopes that the folded up piece of paper in her book isn’t another one of those letters that always seems to send him into a sulky funk.

“And there’s no way she could have gone missing earlier in the day?” Joan asks, but the answer’s written right in front of her.  There’s a time stamped security camera still from the gym’s entrance that shows Jess Delhaney leaving the gym, complete with convenient wall clock to verify that the time is, indeed, correct.  She’d apparently disappeared without a trace from there. 

Sherlock looks up from the floor, all smeary and red as he starts to wipe away the soap suds.  “As you can see, a conundrum.”

 -

Yan Ling is a beat cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time almost a year ago.  He’s a nervous man with half a day’s beard growth, fiddling with the styrofoam cup of coffee he’s been given by Captain Gregson like he’s done something wrong.  Joan doesn’t think he has, though, his twitchiness can easily be explained away by the dark bags under his eyes and the drawn, worried expression that tugs his at his thin lips.  His wife is missing, and he hasn’t slept in probably two days.  Anyone would be a little twitchy.

“I can’t give you many details on the State’s case that I’m giving deposition for,” Yan explains.  He glances from Joan to Sherlock and back again.  He’s not one of their usual beat cops as he works out of the Cobble Hill office and not the 11th Precinct.  He doesn’t know them or who they are, but he doesn’t seem averse to talking with them, which is a start.  “Captain Gregson offered his office to the state’s attorney as it was major cases who caught the guy, and I was in court for something else yesterday morning,” he sighs and reaches for his coffee once more.  “I witnessed a drug deal where the dealer got shot,” he added.  “Turns out, the guy was pretty high up the ladder in a cartel.”

“In Cobble Hill?” Joan asks, a little incredulous.  It’s a good neighborhood, upscale.  She can’t picture drug buys going down on the corner in a place like that.

“Watson, you of all people should know that drugs have very few boundaries. If anything, the neighborhood would be prime real estate – people of means are far more likely to have the money to pay for drugs,” Sherlock replies tersely.  Yan looks at him for a moment before shrugging and glancing back at Joan. She’s giving Sherlock her best stink-eye and it’s going right over the bastard’s head. 

She resists the urge to groan. 

“Anyway,” she says, turning a kind eye to Yan once more.  “Officer Ling, is there anything else that you can tell us?  Did your wife have any enemies, would anyone want to hurt her?”

And he has no answers for her, just the same story that they’ve been hearing over and over again.  Jess Delhaney is a well-liked, second-generation, Asian-American teacher with no enemies to speak of. Joan hates this case already.

They go back to the brownstone after Sherlock sweet-talks Gregson out of the case file that Yan had been a witness in.  Joan has no idea how he does it, but Gregson hands over the case almost without a fight, and he makes them promise to lock it up when they’re not using it.  Sherlock, naturally, does exactly the opposite and leaves the contents of the box strewn around the living room as he peruses the case notes.

Half an hour later, he announces that he doesn’t think that Yan’s case has anything to do with Jess’ disappearance and starts to put everything away save a few family photographs that he’s pinned to the wall.  Joan’s a little surprised, as the whole thing seemed to really hedge on there being a connection so that they could discern an easy motive.  Now, though, Jess’ kidnapping seems completely random and they have nothing to go on.

Joan slips the letter out of her book, and stacks it on top of the original case file and retreats upstairs under the pretense of checking over the facts one more time.  She grabs her laptop before she disappears, and carries the stack slowly up the stairs, watching as Sherlock settles back into his usual thinking routine. Sherlock paces, up and down the length of the kitchen and living room, his eyes half closed and his lips moving as he hashes out possibilities.  Joan leaves him to it.

The letter is dated last week, when she’d caught Sherlock reading this book and asked to read it when he was through.  Joan reads it slowly, digesting the words and wondering if this letter had any purpose at all, other than to drive Sherlock into a depressive spiral once more.  It certainly doesn’t seem too, and the imagery in the words alone is enough to make Joan’s skin crawl. 

 _I do hope you’ll write back soon_ , she’s written.  And she’s signed it with a name that might very well be her true name. 

And Joan almost feels bad for leaving such a beautiful mind to rot in Newgate.  Almost.

A few google searches later and Joan’s back downstairs and tucking the letter back into the book.  She hates to be nosy, and she doesn’t want Sherlock to judge her for reading his mail, but she worries about him.  Keeping contact with the one person who can summarily destroy him with a simple _look_ is not what Joan thinks of as a healthy behavior by any means. 

“Jess wasn’t the first,” Joan says.  She heads to the printer and hands Sherlock three separate missing persons cases that remain open and unsolved.  They date back four years.  He stares at them, and then leans back, glaring at his wall of evidence.  “I figured that we should check to see if any open cases had a similar MO, since Officer Ling’s case probably has no bearing on this kidnapping.”

Sherlock glances over the particulars of the cases and then turns on one socked heel and heads towards the door.  “We need to have a look at these case files as well,” Sherlock announces.

-

Jess Delhaney, 27, wife of NYPD officer Yan Ling has been kidnapped. 

It’s all over the TV news, and the papers are reporting it.  The wife of a police officer’s been missing since sometime yesterday afternoon and probably has less than five hours to live.  Jamie wonders if she’s the only one who knows that particular tidbit of information.  She recognizes the work from what they’ve put in the papers, and she wonders when he started to operate out of New York. 

They foolishly let her read the papers in this place every day.  She has to pay for the subscription, but it comes in with the mail, all unfurled and carefully checked for coded messages.  They’re still there, naturally, but not where one might think.  She supposes that that’s part of the fun.

Her lieutenants have been keeping her apprised of various happenings that cannot be discussed over the phone through a series of carefully coded classified ads in the middle of the Post.  Jamie doesn’t like how anyone could decode her messages, should they know what to look for, but this is the easiest method and it does save a great deal of time. 

She’s a little surprised when she finds herself devouring the article about Jess Delhaney, but brushes it off as a mind rusty for the game she longs to play once more.  What is more troublesome is the nagging feeling of worry that has settled into the pit of her stomach upon the realization of just who has taken the missing woman.  They would have been called in to consult on this case, Jamie is sure of it.  Which would put her squarely into this man’s crosshairs.  She’s just his type.

It is completely unacceptable that Sherlock put her in harm’s way, even if it is inadvertent. 

The newspaper is abandoned on her bed and she finds herself sketching a simple winter scene that she’s sure she’s recalling from a memory in pencil so hard that it is sure to rip the paper if she dares shade.  She does it on cheap commissary cardstock, adding details as best she can, and carefully tearing it down to the size of an American postcard.  All her mail is screened, but this should escape their scrutiny no problem. It doesn’t say much of anything, after all.

There’s graphite smeared all over the edge of her palm and down her cheek and she’s scrawling her warning to Sherlock almost before she starts to ponder why it is that she’s so worried. Sherlock has proven himself a negligent guardian of things he loves in the past, but that was the past.  This is a Sherlock who is aided by her, a woman who understands Jamie far more intimately than she cares to admit. 

White knuckled fingers grasp the pencil in her hand and she writes her warning against her better judgment.  She can’t take chances until she understands Joan Watson.

Her pencil falls to her lap and rolls down her leg and onto the floor. 

“He has a type.  Keep her safe.”

She does so hope that he’ll bring her with him when he comes.

-

They’re up half the night at the precinct, sitting on uncomfortable folding chairs and drinking far too much bad coffee.  Joan’s switched from her notebook to a legal pad, documenting everything that they’ve found that might possibly be relevant.  It’s cold in the room that they’ve been given, and at two in the morning when Joan is starting to nod off, Sherlock shakes her gently.  She’s wrapped up in his jacket and sweater, curled up in the chair in such a way that unfolding herself is almost painful. 

“Let’s go home,” he says, and his expression is almost kind before it slips back into its usual blank thousand-yard stare.  “Not much more we can do here tonight.”

It startles Joan, honestly.  She’s not used to kindness from him.  She’s not sure that he has it in him on some days.  She trails after him, feeling almost like a ghost as they make their way through the largely abandoned precinct halls.  She gives him back his coat and together they step into the freezing night to find a cab waiting for them.

“Called for it before I woke you,” Sherlock explains, opening the door for her and telling the cabbie their address. 

She smiles at him then, because it was a kind thing of him to do.  It’s the little moments like this that make her sure, oh so sure, that there’s more to Sherlock than what he allows people to see.  His mind is a great and vast space, yes, but there is something so basely human about him that sometimes Joan has to remind herself of it as often as she finds herself forgetting. 

Joan dozes off on his shoulder as they drive back home, and he hums quietly under his breath.  It’s nice, honestly, to be this close to someone.  She hasn’t felt this way in years, and even though there’s no attraction between the pair of them, this is probably the most intimate that she’s ever been with someone. 

The brownstone is cold and Joan sleeps fitfully, dreaming of cold eyes and smirking lips and letters written to Sherlock with the intent to drive him into madness.  They’re terrible dreams, and when she wakes just before dawn, she doesn’t force herself to go back to sleep.  She has to see if he’s alright.

He’s sitting on the couch in the front room, his feet tucked up underneath himself in a tank top and boxers.  The paper is open to the classifieds in his lap, and what looks like a hand drawn post card of some sort is cradled between two hands. 

“It seems,” he says tiredly.  “That we have a problem.”

He passes her the postcard, and Joan holds it gingerly.  It’s a picture of a lake in winter that Joan’s sure that she’s seen in a book somewhere, maybe even on her mother’s coffee table.  On the back is a message that makes her blood run cold. 

“She knows who this guy is?” Joan’s still half asleep and the clock on the wall says it’s scarcely seven fifteen, but the thought is enough to push her fully into wakefulness. 

Sherlock holds up the newspaper to an ad circled in red pen.  “She’s not behind it though.”

Joan is about as inclined to believe that as she’s inclined to believe that this is anything more than a plea for attention.  “That’s a classified ad,” she replies.  Her glasses are upstairs still, so she ends up holding the ad about four inches from her nose to make it out the text.  “An ad that doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s because it’s a code,” Sherlock explains, hopping to his feet and crossing to the desk.  He picks up file folder and passes it over to Joan. He bites his lip and stares down at the file folder in her hands. Joan opens it, but without her glasses it’s all but meaningless to her.  She’ll have to run back upstairs and get them.  She glances towards the stairs and steps towards them, but is stopped as Sherlock starts to speak once more.  “As I’m sure you are aware, she has been writing me letters from Newgate Prison.  This is the first time I am even remotely inclined to listen to what she has to say.”

Joan thinks of the cold cases, “He has a type.” She says quietly, horror dawning like a cold knife in her back. 

“And Moriarty of all people wants me to keep you safe,” Sherlock replies.

-

They have three names now, along with Jess Delhaney’s, and a sick picture of the man that they were looking for was starting to emerge.  Wei Lin, 25, grad student at Columbia is the most recent disappearance.  Her parents were both in shipping and lived in Hong Kong for much of the year now that their daughter was grown. She disappeared within two weeks of Toshiko Evans, 31.  Both women disappeared a little over a year and a half ago, Toshiko across the river in Jersey City and Lin from her apartment in midtown.  Toshiko had had a family, but Lin’d lived alone and hadn’t had many close friends, a recent arrival to the city.  The third case is the one that interests Joan the most out of the three.  It is the first; Wilhelmina Dong, daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant who was studying theatre at Pace University. 

Two years ago, like Jess Delhaney, she disappeared without a trace from her dorm, never to be seen or heard from again.  The only difference in the case was that they’d had a solid suspect, but had never had enough for a search warrant. 

“So let me see if I’m understanding you both correctly,” Bell is saying to Sherlock as Joan goes over the notes before her and tries not to think of the cryptic message that’s currently pinned to the center of Sherlock’s evidence board.  Joan’s read what Sherlock suspects is a coded message for Moriarty hidden in the classifieds of the _Post_ , but she’s not quite sure that they’re not Sherlock hearing hoof beats and thinking zebras.  Even decoded, the messages made little sense. 

Sherlock makes an exasperated noise but settles down on the chair next to Joan.  “We think that Ms. Delhaney’s disappearance is connected to the disappearances of these three other women.  We have reason to believe that he targets women of Asian descent between the ages of eighteen and thirty five.” Sherlock glances nervously at Joan before adding, “Also I think it might be worth checking with either the Chinese or Japanese authorities to see if they have any similar unsolved cases.”

“What makes you think he’s Asian at all?” Bell asks. “Let alone working overseas?”

 She cuts him off before he can explain their tip off and the probably crazy ramblings of a man who spends _far_ too much time reading the classified’s. Setting the file down on the table, Joan slides it across to him.  “Sonny Park,” she explains.  He was the lead suspect in Wilhelmina Dong’s disappearance, and the only one that the police had ever been able to formally name as a suspect.  “Wilhelmina Dong was the first victim that fits this particular pattern within recent memory.  Before her disappearance there was only one unsolved disappearance of an Asian woman in the Tri-State area that went cold fifteen years ago, and people always suspected that she’d gone off to Vegas to get away from her overbearing mother.  There’s a good chance that Wilhelmina was the first kidnapping victim of this particular person, so it stands to reason that she might have been his first.”

Bell reads over the notes, a sour look on his face.  “The guys in Midtown aren’t gonna like a bunch of Brooklyn cops coming into one of their cases.”

“Shove your turf war,” Sherlock mutters, and Joan is inclined to agree.

“If it helps us find Jess Delhaney, what does it matter?”  Joan asks.

“Cops show up for one of their own,” Bell agrees.  He takes the notes and stands.  “I’m going to run this by Gregson and then I’ll reach out and see if I can’t find the detective who caught Wilhelmina’s case initially.” 

-

The next morning they arrange a meeting with Detective Chet Tremont, who ran point on Wilhelmina Dong’s missing person’s case two years ago.  Joan likes him almost immediately.  He’s got a warm, inviting smile and a thick beard.  There are pictures of his kids plastered all over his desk.  He seems happier than many of the detectives in Major Cases, but Joan reasons that not seeing as many dead bodies as she’s seen in the past year and a half is enough to lift anyone’s spirits. 

He tells them of the particulars over coffee in a diner just down the street from his own precinct.  “Look,” he explains, after he’s ushered them out of the office and into the cold once more.  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate new eyes looking at the case, quite the opposite, but there are some guys in there that have a rather low opinion of the work that you both are doing with Captain Gregson across the river.”

Sherlock inclines his head, conceding the point in a rare display of humility.  Joan wonders if he’s about to say something incredibly rude.  “Captain Gregson does, however, enjoy the highest solve and conviction rate of homicides in the city.”  Okay, scratch the rude, substitute in incredibly conceited.  Joan kicks him under the table.

Chet Tremont leans back and laughs, long and full.  Joan smiles politely into her tea and Sherlock flashes her a smile across the table.  He is victorious, and she won’t give him the satisfaction. “That he does, Mr. Holmes, that he does.” 

“I don’t really know if I can help you out very much on Wilhelmina’s case, though,” He sighs and pulls a massive file folder out of his messenger bag, placing it resolutely down on the table.  “This is my personal file, okay.  We were never able to find anything on Park when we questioned him two years ago.  I kept the investigation open, but seriously, the man’s a ghost.”

“How do you mean?” Joan asks, even though they all probably know the answer.  Men like Park, should he indeed be as guilty as they suspect he is, do not wish to be found.  They are like all the other members of the seedy criminal underground that they’ve encountered thus far.  Ghosts on paper, multiple aliases, no permanent address. Joan’s half-way convinced that they won’t even find the guy now, and that Jess Delhaney’s chances of survival are getting slimmer by the day. 

If she isn’t already dead, that is.  The thought grips Joan and she sighs, trying not to think of the warning tacked up front and center on the wall with pictures of Jess Delhaney and all the information that they’ve gathered so far.

She doesn’t care what that particular member of the criminal underbelly of the world has to say on the matter.  It doesn’t do to well too heavily on the past, and she’s still so angry at all that’s happened. 

“Either Sonny Park was an alias or he simply didn’t exist prior to three years ago,” Detective Tremont explains.  He opens the file and after a few seconds of rummaging pulls out a print out from one of the national security websites that Joan’s caught Sherlock hacking into on more than one occasion.  “This is from Social Security,” he says, passing it to Sherlock, who glances at it, before passing it over to Joan.”

“This says that his number didn’t even get assigned until 2010…” Joan reads.  “Did he immigrate?”

“Not legally,” Detective Tremont replies.  “There’s no record of him anywhere in any INS system.  We had half a mind to send him over to them once we were finished with him following the case, but he had a legitimate social, so we figured that we probably couldn’t make it stick.”

“No,” Sherlock replies.  “It is likely that Mr. Park was either provided with that number as part of a rather good alias, or the government assigned it to him.  I find the latter to be rather difficult to believe, especially when one considers that a man like Mr. Park would probably have been viewed as a potential terrorist under your Patriot Act.  Considering the amount of hoops I had to go to get a resident visa to live here, I cannot imagine that one such as Mr. Park would have had the…” Sherlock makes a hand gesture that Joan’s taken to mean ‘je ne sais quois’. He finally settles on, “ _appeal_ to an immigration board.”

Detective Tremont nods his agreement.  “Like I said, I didn’t think we could make anything stick.  We brought him in for questioning back then, but he was able to provide us with a pretty good alibi and his connection to the case itself was fairly intangible.”

“Well then,” Sherlock announces, taking the case file from the table and downing his tea in three quick gulps.  “We must be going.”

“Thank you,” Joan says sincerely, pulling out a five and leaving it on the table to cover their coffees.  “We really appreciate you taking the time to tell us what you know.”

“Anything to help out a fellow officer,” Detective Tremont replies earnestly.  “It was very nice to meet you.”

“And you,” Sherlock says with an almost defiant salute.

-

The day they give her paints is the day that she resolves to leave Newgate behind.  She’s set the plan in motion already. With the police department sufficiently distracted she figures that she’ll have time to make it to a safe house and contemplate her next move before they are able to spare the manpower to track her down.  She’d been considering waiting for a blizzard, but it would have made leaving the country rather difficult, and she does hate driving on snowy roads.

“You’ve earned ‘em,” the guard, Larry, explains with a lecherous grin.  She’s been smiling sweetly at him for months now, biting back bile and revulsion as he touches her hair.  She could kill him three different ways from within her cell, but she needs him until she is rid of this place. 

They don’t allow canvas.  Staples are apparently quite deadly.  Jamie files that information away for later perusal and takes a cut-up cardboard box back to her cell when they lock them up for the evening the day before her escape.  She’s not sure if she actually will paint.  The quality of the supplies she’s been given is terrible, she could do better mixing her own, but they don’t allow inmates outside during the colder months except in short bursts and she’d never have enough time to acquire the supplies that she’d need in that short a period of time.

“Tempera,” she grumbles, reading the back of the brightly colored bottle and wincing.  They’d given her washable paint for children.  She could have at least made do with water colors.  This stuff she’s not sure she can even use without her cell smelling of a primary school for a week. 

No matter, really, it’s not like she’ll be spending another night here.

Jamie sits back and holds the brush in her hand, staring at it for a long time.  She could take someone’s eye out with it, she knows, but she’s not foolish enough to try.  She props up her piece of cardboard and selects the brown and black bottles from the box at her feet. 

Two hours later, she stares down at what she’s painted and rolls her neck back.  If this becomes a trend, she might indeed have a problem.

She’s painted the face of her downfall and she has no idea why.

-

At ten fifty-four on the dot the next morning, Jamie picks up her brush once more and draws a series of black lines through her painting of Joan Watson.  She doesn’t want to make it too easy for Sherlock, but she simply must leave this place.  She doesn’t like how involved they’re getting with this investigation into Jessica Delhaney, they’re treading too close to toes that should not be stepped on without extreme care and a finesse that Sherlock, while beautiful, lacks. 

It will be better to make sure her mandate that Holmes and Watson are not be harmed remains intact from outside the walls of Newgate.

The kind, older guard whose wife is suffering through stage three breast cancer lets her out the front gate without a second look during a shift change at eleven.  She’s taken care of all their medical costs and has gotten his wife admitted to a treatment center that might very well save her life.  A good deed done and good will is garnered.  She walks out the front door and they’re none the wiser and won’t be until the lunch time headcount at one thirty.

There’s a car waiting for her in the prison parking lot, a duffle bag of her clothes (haphazardly folded, she notes with disdain) on the back seat. There are no shoes, so she supposes her slip-ons from the prison are going to have to do until she can get to a safe place.  Still she finds herself irritated by the lack of them as she reaches under the back bumper and finds the hide-a-key tucked into the muffler.  It’s an older model, a Toyota that will blend in well with the other cars in the parking lot.  She thinks it might have once belonged to one of the kitchen staff here once upon a time, but she can’t be sure.  It’s better to have deniability in such matters.

Jamie changes, shivering in the icy cold of the back seat.  She tugs on thick wool socks and jeans and the sweater that’s an old memento from a different time.  It’s frayed at the edges and there’s a hole in the collar. She’s had it since she was sixteen, and she hasn’t ever let go of it.  It was a kind gesture to include this sweater, above all others.  She’ll have to thank whoever put together this bag personally once she addresses the lack of proper footwear.

She braids her hair and tucks it down the back of her sweater. Her hair has always been a vanity, and it’s a dead giveaway to who she is if you know what to look for, it will simply have to remain as inconspicuous as possible until she can figure out if they are even going to bother looking for her.   She’s sure that they will, but with a massive manhunt for someone who is already dead underway, there’s only so much manpower that can be spared to track her down.  They might just let her go.

The realization that she might not even be chased by Sherlock, as his attentions are elsewhere irritates Jamie and she sits in the backseat of her escape plan and stews for a good five minutes.  She doesn’t understand why it bothers her.  Sherlock will always chase her.  It is part of who he is.  She is his white whale, Jamie knows this.  That is not what bothers her.  What bothers her is more base, and it’s certainly not what she was expecting to be bothered by at all. 

If Sherlock won’t chase her, then he won’t bring her along.  And the realization that it is her that she wants to see, rather than Sherlock, her most favorite game, troubles Jamie deeply.  She resolves that she must get to the bottom of it, and understand why exactly it is that she is so desperate to see her once more.

It is only then that she climbs over the center console and into the driver’s seat.  Jamming the keys into the ignition, Jamie turns the car over and pulls from the parking space.  There’s a wallet with a new identity for her and three hundred dollars in cash.  It’s been four months, but she finally feels free. 

The drive to the city is fairly quick, all things considered.  She parks a few blocks away from building and tugs on the jacket and skull cap that were underneath the duffle of her clothing and supplies.  It’s easy work then, to throw away her old prison clothes in some unsuspecting restaurant’s dumpster.

She can already see the car being driven away behind her.  Her people are good, they’ll leave it in the long term parking at Orient Point, pointing Sherlock firmly towards Providence and Boston and cities to the north.  A smile tugs at her lips and she vanishes into the busy street in the middle of the lunch time rush, vindicated and free for the first time in what feels like years.

_-_

They're eating when after spending half the night going through Tremont's file on Wilhelmina Dong's disappearance when Sherlock gets a call from Captain Gregson that has all of the color draining from his face and his hand slamming down on the table.  This is the angriest that Joan's seen him in a long time, and she can think of only one person who can rile him so.

"We'll be at the station in twenty minutes," Sherlock says, glancing around at the cafe they're sitting in.  He seems almost nervous, and Joan knows for sure then that this is far more serious than whatever it was that they were discussing before he'd gotten the call.

Sherlock hangs up and pulls his wallet from his pocket.  He throws down two twenties for their seven dollar sandwiches and gets up and stalks from the cafe.  Joan blinks at his retreating back, takes one last bite of her sandwich and hurries after him.

He's halfway down the block by the time she catches him, hands jammed into his jacket pockets and a scowl on his lips.

"What was that?" Joan demands, catching up to him and falling into step behind him.  The streets are caked with rock salt and sand, but there's no snow in sight.  It's still freezing, however, and she's wearing something like three layers and has somehow been roped into carrying all of Chet Tremont's paperwork in her purse. Being thrown off balance by the heavy weight of the files one shoulder is enough to make Joan plant her feet very cautiously on dark patches of sidewalk on the shady side of the street.

He looks at her then, face twisted in anguish and what might have been fear on a lesser man.  "Moriarty has let herself out of Newgate."  And the fact that he doesn't say escaped speaks volumes in and of itself. Joan knows that she cannot be alone in her surprise that Moriarty stayed put for as long as she did.  To Joan at least, it seemed almost as though she'd biding her time until the moment seemed right, and the city undergoing a massive manhunt for a missing woman seems as good a cover as any.

She reaches out and touches his arm and he doesn't flinch away from her, which is good.  She watches him, looking for the ticks and signs that she's been trained to look for.  He seems fairly calm, if worried and obviously stressed.  "Are you okay?" she asks.

The answer she gets isn't an answer to the question at all, and Joan hates that she can't shake him and force him to actually answer.  "Captain Gregson wants us to come in so that we can discuss options."  He glances over at Joan and adds, "I keep thinking of the warning that she sent.  It doesn't make sense to pass on a warning - to draw at least some modicum of my attention back to her - only to let herself out of prison two days later."

Joan bites her lip.  "Maybe it's just coincidence?"  she suggests.  "This story's been all over the news and the papers for the past two days.  Jess Delhaney's been missing for three days now.  Inmates are allowed to get the newspaper, it makes sense that she'd see it and want to pass on a message."

"But why?"  Sherlock demands. He's brimming with energy now, and Joan knows that if they weren't walking so briskly he'd probably start pacing circles around her.   "You're in no danger, Joan.  You're with me constantly and I am sure that Ms. Delhaney's kidnapper is quite occupied with keeping her from being found at the moment."

Something occurs to Joan then.  Her mind starts to race, thinking about the second two cases, the ones that are so close together that it seemed to the detectives at the time that they had to be linked, even though a genuine connection was never found between them.  "The second two disappearances happened in very short order, didn't they?"

"Yes within two weeks, but what does this have to do with Moriarty?"  Sherlock asks.  They're only a few blocks away from the station now, having covered the distance in a far shorter period of time than Joan would have thought possible.  She knows that she has to hurry before she loses Sherlock to a wave of Moriarty-induced mania.

"We need to go back to the missing persons cases.  Check for people who went missing around Wilhelmina’s disappearance, either before or after.  I think he takes people in twos."  The idea is still half-baked in Joan's mind right now, and the idea that Moriarty knows who this guy is makes Joan want to go and find her, rather than continue to look into the one viable name they have.  Still, it’s a better theory than any of the others that they’ve got right now.

"What makes you so sure?"  Sherlock asks.  He appears to be pondering the idea, and he doesn't look quite so royally pissed off, Joan takes the little victories where she can get them.

"Because the first is a distraction.  With each of the disappearances that we've looked at, there's been a massive man hunt, police attention has been focused on the missing girl - which leaves a great deal more freedom for him..." Joan shakes her head and sighs quietly.  "This guy takes people who will be notable, who people will look for, and I'd be willing to bet that if we looked, we'd find other disappearances around the same time.  People who might have otherwise gone unnoticed."

They've reached the station and Joan lets Sherlock hold the door open for her and takes the steps two at a time, her boots clicking quietly along as climbs.  Sherlock trails behind her, scuffing his feet along the floor and shoving his scarf into his jacket pocket.  He looks concerned, and Joan guesses he’s thinking over the evidence.

It seems like half the taskforce is standing around the conference table, looking exhausted and sipping on cold, bad coffee.  Joan listens to the report and politely refuses the offer of protective custody for both herself and Sherlock.  “She’s many things, but I don’t think she’d actually hurt Sherlock, at least not physically.”

“And yourself?” Captain Gregson asks after the meeting is over and they’re talking in the hallway.  “She’s already proven that she has no compunction about pulling you off the street.”

Joan just shrugs.  “I can take care of myself,” she says quietly.  She has been going to Sherlock’s self-defense teachers.  She takes that part of her training very seriously, and it’s paid off a few times now, getting her out of tight situations that Captain Gregson probably doesn’t need to know about.  She isn’t afraid of Moriarty.  Joan likes to think she understands the woman, at least a little.  “Although I do appreciate your concern.”

“You cost her a lot of money, Joan, remember that.  Money is a powerful motivator.”

She does, but she doesn’t think that money is Moriarty’s motivator.  She likes the chase, the fun, the challenge; Sherlock says she likes games.  The whole plot had been so carefully conceived that Joan stumbling into the middle of it was just enough to cause a slight hiccup; it didn’t stop it from happening.  She doesn’t think anything could have, once the plan was set into motion.  That, more so than anything else, is what is scary about Moriarty to Joan.  The level of planning, right down to minutia that most people wouldn’t even think of, is singularly unique to anything that Joan has ever encountered before.  She just hopes that there will not be a fall out like there was the last time they clashed.  She doesn’t think that Sherlock could survive it.

Gregson disappears into his office and Joan stands in the middle of the bullpen, hands in her pockets as she listens to Bell and Sherlock debate the merits of trying to figure out if anyone else has gone missing within the five boroughs within the past three days.  She’s almost positive there are, but she’s not sure that they’d be able to get a true read on it right now.  People are coming and going constantly, especially at this time of the year.

It is December 18th and Jessica Delhaney has been missing for nearly four days.

-

Sonny Park is damn near impossible to locate in the city, but eventually they find record of his renting a storage unit in Vinegar Hill over by the Naval Yard.  Joan makes sure that they take Detective Bell and a warrant with them, she doesn’t want to take any chances that Sherlock’s usual brand of jumping to conclusions.  They’d spent the better part of the afternoon going through the missing persons database.  Joan took Wilhelmina’s and Sherlock looked through current case files.  They’d come up with a whole lot of nothing.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” Bell asks gloomily from the driver’s seat of his car as they drive through rush hour traffic towards the storage facility. 

“Statistically speaking, probably not,” Sherlock replies, chin resting on his palm and staring out the window.  “But if we are correct and this is simply the kidnapper’s smoke screen to cover up the real crime he is either about to commit or has already committed..." He trails off and purses his lips before turning back to to meet Bell's eyes through the rear-view mirror of the car. "I suppose there is a chance that Ms. Delhaney might still be alive. She has not yet worn out her usefulness to him.”

Joan is a little taken aback at how human that sounds, coming from Sherlock of all people.  He is usually so crass and caustic with his assessment of situations, scathingly explaining the statistics that everyone already knows.  She turns to glance at him, but he’s staring resolutely out the window as the Red Hook streets inch slowly past. 

Twenty minutes of rather tense silence and Sherlock kneeing the back of her seat no less than seven times, they’re standing before a self-storage facility that boasts that it is open twenty-four hours in bright neon letters for anyone who happened to be looking to notice.  Bell knocks on the office door and explains to the teenager who obviously was looking to do his homework on the job that they have a warrant to search Mr. Park’s storage locker and if he could please collect the keys and escort them to it. 

Sherlock’s pacing, checking his phone and eyeing Joan’s suspiciously as she texts Oren back a response to his truly horrible pun from earlier.  He asks if she’s working on the Jess Delhaney case, and she replies in the affirmative before Bell motions for them to follow him and the kid down the row of storage bays. 

They turn so many times that Joan feels like a mouse in a maze, but finally stop before unit number 234-B.  The kid unlocks the door and Bell pushes him back and pulls out his gun, lifting the door slowly. 

There are five large oil drums at the back the locker and a few boxes of what look like personal affects and a rusty old bicycle.  Joan takes half a step forward, staring at the floor.  It is still wet, like something damp has just recently been dragged over it. 

“How long has it been since this locker was accessed?” Bell demands.  He rounds on the kid while Sherlock and Joan venture further into the locker and the kid takes half a step back and shrugs broad.

“I wouldn’t know, it’s not like we keep a log or anything.”

Bell lets out an exasperated sigh.  “Do you at least have security cameras?”

“Not over here we don't,” the kid replies.  He gestures to the light post over by the entrance.  “We have one on this entrance and one at the back.  I can get you the tape, if you want, but it’s been mad slow all day.”

-

The apartment belongs to her aunt, dead since she was twelve.  Jamie’s kept it up because she finds it useful. She hasn’t been here in years, though, and her people haven’t done much else other than clean and leave fresh food in the ancient refrigerator.  Jamie stands in the middle of the tiny living room and inhales deeply.

On the kitchen counter, there is a laptop bag and cellphone.  A note is sitting on top of it with the day’s current figures and Jamie smiles, recognizing the handwriting of Sam Westin, one of her most trusted lieutenants. Nearly thirty percent of her assets are still frozen thanks to the interference of Joan Watson, but the rest is still there, accruing interest and making things run more smoothly.  If she were motivated by money, it would be a sure motive for revenge, but now it just makes her curious.  She certainly will never underestimate Joan Watson again.

She picks up the phone and dials Sam Westin’s number from memory.  She likes these phones, they’re safe and untraceable.  She never realized how much she’d miss being able to simply call someone and not speak in code.

“Westin,” he answers promptly, as always. 

“It’s me,” she says, unzipping the laptop bag and pulling the computer out.  This place doesn’t have cable, but she’s got a wireless card that will allow her to access the Internet and her organization’s secure network.  She has to see if they’re even bothering to look for her. 

“It’s good to hear your voice,” Westin replies. Jamie knows that false platitudes are not his style, and the genuine warmth that comes across the phone line is enough to make her lips quirk upwards, ever so slightly, into a smile.  Westin is a unique case amongst her trusted body guards and inner circle.  He’s from Yorkshire, adopted as a baby from some hell-hole orphanage north of Shanghai, and raised to be the perfect son just as she was raised to be the perfect daughter. Something, as it usually did, had gone terribly wrong somewhere along the way.  Westin had come to her attention quite by chance, sticking his nose into her business when he was only nineteen. She’d thought, briefly, about having him killed – but he’d proved himself far too reliable for that.  Now he’s her go-to man for most of her operations in Asia, and he’s proven himself invaluable time and time again.  “I trust everything is to your liking?”

“There were no shoes,” Jamie replies, scowling and typing in a series of passwords and decryptions on the laptop. After being forced to establish new security parameters for five different levels of encryption, the machine whirrs to life.  Soon her desktop has loaded and she grimaces, she has over 2,000 new emails to go through.  “While it wasn’t a problem, it was a mistake that could have potentially cost a lot more than my freedom, Westin.”

“I’ll address the issue.”

“Thank you.”  She clicks into a series of bookmarked links from before things had gone so wrong with Sherlock – her usual ways of keeping tabs on what he was up to.  The local news sites aren’t giving her any new information on Jess Delhaney’s disappearance and Westin is waiting so politely for her to finish her thought.  “I want you to approach someone,” she begins, choosing her words carefully.  “Find out if he’s on a job.”

“Who?” Westin asks.  Two of their best operatives are dead, thanks to Sherlock’s interference, so their options are rather limited, at least according to how Westin would see the game.  This is why Jamie likes him, he’s loyal and doesn’t ask many questions.

“Park,” Jamie supplies.  She drifts away from the laptop to stand before the half-closed blinds of the front window.  The street below is full of the bustle of post-lunch traffic, little people scurrying to get back to work.  From five floors up, they seem a safe distance away.  Jamie rests her fingers on the cool glass and stares out at the building across the street, alike in a similar row of apartments that stretches out in either direction as far as she can see.  This is her life for the foreseeable future, provided they don’t start to look for her.

“I think you know that he’s on a job, mum,” Westin replies.

It’s easy then, to want to dismiss Westin in kind and tell him to not question her judgment.  It is, however, a completely valid point.  “Yes, but I’m not a fool.  Delhaney is the smoke screen to distract the police from his real target.  The fact that she’s connected to law enforcement makes me think that his true target might be…” she trails off, thinking. Park may be working for someone else, which means that they must tread carefully.  Who could possibly want…

Westin interrupts her thoughts, “Shall I tell him you’ve got a better offer?”

She rests her forehead against the window, cool glass warming underneath her touch.  She doesn’t think that Park will stop, if he’s not on a job.  He’s never been one for playing well with others, which is why Jamie only knows him by reputation.  The one time she’d considered using his services he’d told her to fuck off and she’d found herself faced with the unpleasant situation of scrambling to find someone else to take the job.  Moran had come in rather handy that day, and she’s still rather irritated that he’d had to become disposable in order to keep the ruse alive.  “Tell me, Mr. Westin, what was the one rule I set for this city?”

He lets out an almost amused sounding chuckle.  He must have caught on to her line of thinking.  Took him long enough.  “That Sherlock Holmes is not to be harmed in any way.”

“If my assumption regarding Mr. Park is correct, he may be dangerously close to breaking that rule.” She’s unused to voicing her sentiments regarding Sherlock (and by extension Joan Watson) to her subordinates.  She doesn’t think it’s a particularly proper thing to do; they don’t need to know her motivations for doing things, only that she wants them done.  To give them anything that might lead to their questioning her judgment was a sure way to get people killed.  The only reason she the tells Westin at all is because he must understand how vital it is that he dissuade Park from doing exactly what Jamie’s almost convinced he is about to do.

“And we can’t have that, mum.” Westin says.

“No, Mr. Westin, I don’t believe we can.”

_-_

It's three in the morning before Sherlock finally crashes, curled up on the couch.  Joan ventures into his bedroom and collects a quilt for him and leaves him to his sleep.  The fire's died down enough that she doesn't bother to put the grate in front of it before retreating to her own bedroom and collapsing, exhausted, into bed.

Sleep doesn't come, and Joan lies awake for what feels like hours, staring at the water stains on the ceiling and counting down the seconds until dawn.  She's cold and tired and her bed feels lovely, but there's so much she should be doing right now.  She hates this feeling, the lulls in investigations.

They'd watched the security footage over and over, and had seized the barrels for testing.  They're full of what is probably hydrochloric acid and probably the remains of the five missing women.  Joan's not sure that any biological material is going to be left to identify the slop as their missing girls.  She figures that that might actually be the point.

A man fitting Park's description, stocky, mid-thirties and of Asian (Sherlock suspects that Park himself is Korean) descent had come to the storage unit earlier that day on foot.  He had wheeled the barrel that they'd found into the unit and had collected a small duffle before leaving again, dragging his hand truck after him. Sherlock had noted that it looked as though his shoulder was injured, as he wasn't using his obviously dominant hand to do much other than steady the barrel on its hand cart. Joan speculated that maybe he'd pulled a muscle, loading a barrel that heavy down from a truck of some sort by himself.

Unfortunately, a mid-morning shower had erased pretty much all chances of their being able to track his path back to whatever he'd used to transport his barrel.

This case was taking them in circles, and Joan couldn't shake Moriarty's warning.  It had to mean something, even if she'd turned around then and had escaped from prison. The puzzle pieces didn't fit, at least not in a way that Joan could make sense of them.

Since when was Moriarty interested in her anyway?

Rolling over and staring off into the blackness of her bedroom, Joan supposes that she did cost the woman over a billion dollars and money is always a good motivator.  It still doesn't fit, and she's not sure she likes it.

When sleep finally claims Joan, it's close to four thirty and she doesn't dream at all.


	2. breaking my back (you know my name)

Somewhere around eleven o’clock that evening it occurs to Jamie that she hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast that morning.  It seems almost like an afterthought to her, but she knows that she must eat  She pulls herself away from her inquiries into what exactly they’ve been up to since they’d spoiled her most perfect plan and wanders into the kitchen.  There’s food in the refrigerator, but she doesn’t much feel like _cooking_ and take out is out of the question.  After venturing into a third, slightly dusty cabinet, she finds a box of pasta and a pot to boil water in.  It’s better than nothing.

Jamie is halfway through boiling water for pasta when there's a knock on the door.  She freezes, hand flying to the gun on the countertop next to the box of pasta and her empty laptop case.  They can't have found her already, they aren’t that good, and her people know better than to come here.

That leaves two possibilities, neither of which she's particularly keen on entertaining at the moment.  She cuts off the stove and takes the gun in hand with her as she goes to peer gingerly through the peep hole. She keeps her distance, grateful that she’s left the light in the apartment’s tiny entry hallway dark so that the shadows don’t play underneath the door.  The last thing she wants is to take a bullet from the other side of her door through her own carelessness.

Sam Westin is on the other side of the door, looking agitated and nervous.  He appears to be alone, but what is even more concerning is that he appears to be injured.  Frowning, Jamie slides the chain back and counts to ten before checking the peep hole one more time.  The vantage point from this particular apartment is enough that she’s sure he's alone in the hallway.  Her aunt, long dead and a drunk, had good taste in vantage points.

"You know better than to come here," she hisses angrily at him.  She ushers him inside and leaves the gun in her hand plainly visible, hanging loosely at her side.  She doesn't think that she's about encounter a double cross, but she's not about take a chance, even with one of her most valued soldiers.  She's learned that everyone has their price, and she'd really rather not have to move safe houses right now.

Sam Westin sighs and steps into the light of the front room.  He looks around for a moment, and then collapses onto the couch, pulling off his jacket and wincing as blood begins to blossom on his shirt from what Jamie suspects is a recently stitched up shoulder.  "This couldn't be said over the phone, apologies."

She perches on the low coffee table directly in front of him after closing her laptop and setting it aside.  Their knees are almost touching and her gun is set almost casually on her lap.  She doesn’t do it out of want to intimidate him, she trusts him far more than she trusts some of her other people.  Westin is loyal to a fault, which is part of why she’s left him somewhat in charge of the operation when she was away.  "Oh?"

"Park wasn't too happy to see me," Westin explained, tugging back his shirt and looking at the bandage and sighing.  His cheeks are pale and drawn he looks exhausted and years older than he has since the last time Jamie saw him. She supposes that being in prison has not helped those in her organization who are unused to carrying the weight of it around. She’d left him with a great deal of responsibility and a very healthy fear of what might happen, should he fail.  It would take its toll on anyone.

"He can't have been that displeased, you're still alive," Jamie comments, leaning forward and checking the bandage that’s been haphazardly taped on to his shoulder.  Straight through the shoulder, it looks like. He'll be worthless as a body guard for at least two months, which is a shame really, because she’s going to have to speak to the people who’ve procured Park’s services and she’d rather not do it alone. "I trust you went to one of our doctors."

"Of course," Westin says.  He doesn't seem particularly embarrassed that she's pulling his shirt away from his shoulder, but rather looks almost terrified as she sits back, her expression growing murderous as the pieces fall into place. It’s good that she can still control his fear like that.  Fear is a powerful motivator, and Westin has been afraid of her for nearly a decade.  It makes him a better soldier.

"Was I correct?"

He nods, and then winces.  His hand flies up to clutch at his shoulder.  He stops just short of touching it, and his face contorts in pain as he lowers his hand to rest it shakily on his knee and painkillers rattle in his pocket.  She doesn’t envy the pain; being shot is not an experience that Jamie much cares for repeating. "He shot me in the shoulder and then tossed me the keys to a rental and said that I looked enough like him to do some dirty work.  I did it because it was the only way that he'd let me walk away with his message."

She levels an icy stare at him.  A false trail and that makes her hiding place all the more vulnerable.  Clever boy.  She almost wants to smile, her mind sat idle for so long that this feels like a breath of much-needed fresh air.  There are still too many variables, but she’s cast her net wide this time, she has to weed out the fact from the extraneous detail. "What did he have you do?"

"Put a barrel in storage and collect a duffle bag from it," Sam replies tiredly. He looks like he'd rather be anywhere but here, explaining to his boss that he'd gone and messed the whole thing up. "I did it and then got the hell out of there.  The rental's still where I left it, checked it over after the hospital let me out. It's from the airport, rented this morning. I put the cleaners on it."  He looks down at the gun in Jamie's lap and finally tells her what she needs to know.  "He knows that you got made, that the organization is at a disadvantage right now, and he wants nothing to do with you."

What little color there is in Jamie's cheeks drains at that, and she grips the gun tightly in both hands.  She stares down at it, knowing then that the only way that this was going to end was in Park’s death.  It was simply a game of waiting now, to see who would blink first.  "He already has a target in mind?"

"'Fraid so, mum," Westin says. “I wasn’t able to tell if he was working with someone else either.”

Jamie is fairly certain that he is.  Park is the sort of killer who doesn’t play well with others, but he’s also more than willing to thumb his nose at her authority in this city.  She caught him at it nearly a year and a half ago – two dead girls in quick succession, one of whom was the daughter of a fairly reliable shipping contact.  He’d gotten away then, and she wouldn’t be surprised if this was all another two-fingered salute.

Westin looks at her and Jamie starts right back at him.  “I need you to leave,” she says quietly.  “Get well.  We have much to do.”

She shoos him out of the door after helping him into his jacket and making sure that it isn't too obvious that he's bleeding a bit. It's after midnight now, and the streets in this neighborhood are mostly clear, which is good, it means he's less likely to be noticed.  He promises her to never come here again and she tells him that she'll see him when this is over. 

She has to find Park and fast.  He must be taken out of the picture before he can move in on his target.  There is only one logical conclusion as to who he's after and Jamie feels only bewilderment at the surge of self-loathing that rises up within her at the thought of potential failure.  She cannot allow it to happen, but bugger if she knows why.

 It is December 19th and Jessica Delhaney has been dead for forty-eight hours and missing for close to four days.

**Breaking My Back (you know my name)**

Joan’s schedule is thrown off by an early-morning call from her mother, who talks her ear off about holiday plans and demands to know when Joan will be coming home.  Joan, as always, doesn’t have an answer for her.  There never really is one in her line of work.  Her mother understands that she’s finally found what she thinks could be happiness after what had happened to her, but she doesn’t understand the time.  The staring at papers long into the night and waking up in the morning to go catch witnesses and suspects before they get to work.  She’s always running a sleep deficit when they’re on a case, and her mother knows this.

 _Come to think of it_ , Joan thinks darkly as she sleepily tells her mother that she has no concrete plans yet, _that’s probably why she calls as soon as the sun comes up._ Sleep is at a premium right now, and it doesn’t look like she’s going to be getting any more this morning.  She hangs up with her mother a few minutes later and stands barefoot on the freezing floor before the window, stretching.  Worry is gnawing at her stomach and she’s running a mental inventory of all that they know of the Delhaney case, trying to figure out if sleep has brought any new insights.

They’ve got to solve this case soon, as the outlook is looking more and more dire for Jess Delhaney.  Joan tries to remain positive, tries to remind herself that they haven’t found any signs that point to her death, but a great vat full of hydrochloric acid in an anonymous storage facility by the Naval Yard doesn’t inspire much hope at all.  It’s all very Hollywood, and after watching the same security footage that Sherlock watched last night, they’re both pretty convinced that the man who brought the barrel to the storage facility was acting under duress.  If Sherlock has any theories about who the man was, however, he didn’t mention them before he fell asleep and Joan drifted upstairs.

Sherlock is still asleep when Joan ventures downstairs in her running gear.  He stirs when she perches on the edge of the ottoman that still is playing host to his strange craft project from a few nights ago to put on her shoes, but doesn’t wake.  She slips out the door as quietly as possible and begins her run.  He needs the sleep far more than she does, as he has a terrible habit of going and going and going until he simply runs out of steam, and she’s at least able to sleep on a daily basis. 

The air is bitterly cold today.  The weather report on her phone had said that it was only supposed to flirt with freezing today, and even though the sun is out and shining, the wind is coming in off of the river so strongly that it cuts through Joan’s leggings and sweatshirt as though they’re not there at all.  She doesn’t shiver, though, and she knows that if she keeps moving down the usual path that she’ll be too hot in no time.  It’s just the getting there part that Joan hates, when the wind is so cold that it steals the breath from her lungs and traps her inside her pounding head. It’s when the only sound she’s able to hear over her heartbeat is the roar of the wind.

Joan runs and thinks about everything they know about the case.  She suspects that by the time she gets back from her run, they will at least have some preliminary tests on the contents of those barrels.  That will give them something to go off of, because whatever the corrosive agent is within them, it probably isn’t easy to get ahold of.  She tries to think of chemical compounds that will decompose a human body but not a plastic barrel.  The most prominent one she can think of is hydrochloric acid, but it’s also the easiest to make, which would add to the theory that the guy’s a pro and isn’t about to make a foolish mistake like having a difficult to obtain body disposal method.

It’s early enough, thanks to her mother’s call, that there are lot fewer people in the park today, and she’s able to complete her circle without an insane degree of people-dodging.  She’s got half an eye out, looking for anything that seems out of the ordinary, but it’s just the usual dog walkers and running addicts that can’t seem to get enough punishment during the summer months.  There’s someone sitting on a bench in the distance, but Joan thinks it might be Brenda, who is homeless and sometimes has information to pass on to Sherlock.  Joan always tries to make a point of talking to her, if she sees her, but as she approaches, Brenda gets up and walks away from her usual route. 

Her lungs sting and she’s grateful that the sun is at least out.  It means that she’s less likely to slip.  Rock salt crunches under her feet and she hurries along, intent on the brownstone and breakfast.  There are sure to be answers to some of her questions when she gets home too, and she wants to ask Sherlock what his theory is about the man who brought the barrel to the storage unit.  She doesn’t notice the second set of running footsteps until it is far too late.

Something hits her from behind and her whole world goes black.

-

Jamie is streaming the news on mute and sipping a steaming mug of extremely caffeinated tea when she catches a glimpse of Sherlock at the corner of a news broadcast the next morning.  She has to look twice, operating on very little sleep, but it is most assuredly him.  He looks drawn and worried, anxious even.  Jamie can’t recall a time that she’s ever seen him look quite like that, and she knows why almost instantly.  Frowning, she picks up her phone and contemplates it for a moment. She has her own theories about Park’s motivations, and her own precautions already in place.   She taps the send button on one of the drafts she’s saved and waits until the received receipt comes back to her inbox before setting the phone down once more.

What’s troubling is that Joan Watson, usually so visible and present at Sherlock’s side, is nowhere to be found.  Jamie’s a little shocked at how quickly Park has moved, but it does fit his pattern.

She leans over and turns up the laptop’s volume. 

“—missing on route back to her home in Brooklyn this morning. Police are not commenting on if this disappearance and the disappearance of Jessica Delhaney are linked at this time.  If you, or anyone you know, has information regarding the whereabouts of--” 

Jamie closes the laptop with a snap.  This is all moving too quickly, she hasn’t had nearly enough time to plan.  Rushed plans make for sloppy execution and exponentially higher levels of risk.  She doesn’t like being rushed. 

She’s been racing against a ticking clock since she’d first approached Park.  She should have known better than to expect anything less from him.  She’d come into the game half-way through, a relief player.  She’s not sure that she can get ahead of it, and self-doubt is one of her most detested emotions.  She has other theories too, and they require some further investigation before she actually acts on them.  Her perusal of Sherlock’s recent cases, thanks to some carefully placed backdoors into the NYPD database, has yielded one name that merits some further investigation, although Jamie already has a pretty good idea who the man works for.

Her phone is tempting her even now.  Jamie reaches for her tea so as to not cave to the temptation of calling Sherlock when he’s already so low.  She’d try to goad him if she did that, and she needs him sharp.  They must find Joan Watson, and failure is not an option.  Jamie must understand the woman who bested her so easily, and her being kidnapped simply will not do.  No, Sherlock will come to her, she knows it.  She just might have to make it easy for him.

She pushes herself to her feet and drains the last of her tea.  Padding into the kitchen, she collects the empty laptop bag and heads into the bedroom to get dressed.  She wants to get a better look at where Watson went missing from, in case her failsafe does not prove effective.

She discovers that it is bracingly cold outside, once she’s dressed and her hair is pinned underneath a skull cap that had been left with the clothing she’d asked to be brought to the safe house when she’d first been locked away.  She finds boots in the closet that she recognizes from a job in Belize two years ago and more warm socks then she could ever have use for and makes a point of dressing as understatedly as she can.  She has to blend in with the park, not look like she’s at least ten pay grades above it.  She walks the running route that she’s known Joan Watson, a creature of routine and habit, to take daily. 

Jamie walks to the park where she knows Watson runs. There are some reports (mostly newspaper briefs) and a bit of police chatter about her escape.  Priorities seem to have shifted overnight, to their missing officer’s wife and missing consultant, but she’s sure that her picture has been circulated to the cabdrivers of the city by now. Probably with a cash reward included, as if she couldn’t triple what was offered for the driver to simply keep his mouth shut.

There are police around, but they don’t seem to notice her, intent on canvassing the area and asking questions of anyone who might have been around that morning.  With her laptop bag slung over her shoulder, Jamie figures that she looks enough like a commuter to give herself an impermanence that is sure to discourage their attention. 

The park is crowded, people walking their dogs and strolling leisurely through the bitter cold.  Jamie doesn’t understand people who embrace being out of doors at a time like this.  She prefers to stay inside, where she can still feel her toes and ears.  Still, Joan Watson likes to run in all weather, Jamie knows this from the surveillance that she’d done on the pair of them before things had gone so wrong with the Macedonia plot.  So Jamie is here, looking around, trying to figure out who would take Joan Watson from her.

 _Watson_ , Jamie thinks darkly, hands shoved into her pockets and head bowed against the wind, _is mine_.  She is Jamie’s downfall, her perfect mystery and her utter fascination. Someday, maybe, Joan Watson can die, but not until Jamie understands how she was able to see through Jamie so easily.  Park cannot have her, and Jamie will kill him for daring to take her in the first place.  He should have known better.

There is a woman sitting on a park bench, bundled against the cold in a shabby-looking blanket that might have once been olive drab in color, a handcart full of belongings beside her.  She looks up at Jamie and smiles ever so slightly, before turning her gaze back over to the river.  She has the look of a relic, an ancient presence that has been unmoved for as long as the park has existed.  She is the perfect person to ask about what’s happened.

Jamie sits down beside her. 

“Are you looking for her too?” the woman asks after a few minutes of resolute silence, and her voice sounds like wind in an ancient forest.  Groaning out each syllable with what felt like a tremendous effort.  Her eyes are crinkled at the corners and her hair is like grey wire, frizzing out from underneath her hat. 

“Who?” Jamie asks.

“Joanie, dear,” the woman says, turning to face Jamie with a face that looks like it’s seen more wars than Jamie has, more death and more dying. Her eyes are creased at the edges so deeply that Jamie wonders if they were pulled taught if the woman’s brain would be visible.   “She comes by every day, that girl does. Always says hello.  Not today, though.  She was running with someone else and he knocked her down, he did.” 

Jamie thinks of what it must have been like to see that happen and she feels like the right thing to do is the reach out and take the woman’s hand.  She doesn’t particularly care for little displays of kindness and emotion like this, as they are weaknesses that can be exploited.  This old woman has given her a clue, and she deserves the comfort of a kind gesture.  “Where did he take her?” she asks.  She’s pretending to be American again.  It’s not a conscious decision, but it so rarely is.  Being American makes her less memorable, after all, and Jamie’s shooting for anonymity.

"He had a van, big and white," the woman points to a corner of the park where the police canvas is noticeable only in its absence.  There's a single figure standing on the street corner that Jamie would recognize anywhere.  It might be time to approach him after all.  "He took her there and drove towards the bridge."

Kindness has never come easily to her, and she's quashed what little she's had over many years of being as ruthless as possible.  Kindness is not what's earned her wide swaths of control in cities where she should have very little influence.  Still, Jamie understands human emotion and need, and she forces herself to smile even though she knows it's transparent.  This old woman has been wonderfully helpful, and she must repay that favor in kind.

"Do you have a place to go tonight?" she asks.  She watches the figure in the distance move frenetically around the scene of the abduction, investigating.  She wants to get closer, to watch him work and to observe his methods when he is so compromised. 

"The nice man I talked to earlier told me of a place," the old woman points with her mittened hands and Jamie follows her finger. He's been good to her then, it means that Jamie can do what she always does and simply walk away.  "But thank you."

It nags at Jamie though, and she digs out a twenty dollar bill and presses it into the woman's covered hands. The mittens are handmade and expertly done, obviously an old habit from before she'd found herself sleeping on a park bench.  Jamie’s offering this poor old woman a chance, she reasons, to create something once more.  She knows what it feels like to be trapped without a creative outlet; after all, it is a horrible feeling.  "Get yourself some yarn," she says, touching the mittens with almost reverent fingers.  "You are very talented."

She walks away before she can hear the woman say thank you, her face schooled perfectly neutral.  She doesn't need the platitude; she doesn't need any of this.  All she needs is to understand how she was beaten so easily by a woman who is far more than she seems.  She needs to find Joan Watson before Park can get to work - and she needs to ascertain if he's been employed by anyone else.

-

He's standing on the street corner, inspecting scuffmarks in the rock salt and sand on the sidewalk that’s been blocked off by police tape when she draws level with him.  Her hands are jammed into her pockets, one clenched tightly around the grip of her gun and he freezes as soon as he hears her footsteps crunching on the salty ground.

"This is rather brazen, even for you," he says and somehow his voice doesn't shake.  She's proud of him, really she is.  The last time they’d met after time apart, he’d collapsed in a sniveling mess of emotion that she had had no patience for her.  Joan Watson had been there to catch him that time, and Jamie was not going to bother if it happened again.  She stares at him, she doesn't move, doesn't pull her hands from her pockets.  Let him deduce that she’s armed.

He looks awful, his face drawn and his lips chapped bright red from biting at them.  He's always done that, a nervous tick that he probably doesn't even know he has.  "When was the last time you slept?" she asks, not meeting his eyes.  She's taking in the sidewalk and the street corner, and reasons that Park must have someone working with him to make this getaway so cleanly.  There are traffic cameras that probably needed to be disabled remotely, as well as any number of casual observers who happened to be in the park when he’d moved in.

"This morning," he mutters, getting to his feet and stepping carefully around the scuffmarks.  His eyes are red at the edges and Jamie is about to ask if he's ill before she realizes that they're the marks of frustrated tears and she doesn't understand how he could care so deeply for someone he isn't sleeping with.  He’s not thinking clearly then, blinded by emotion as she’s only seen him a few times before, and this is sure to get his dear Watson killed.

She wants to reach out and touch him, but he isn't hers to have anymore.  All she can do is stand an arm's length away and offer the only thing she can think of that might bring him some comfort.  This is what it’s like to have an ex, she realizes, and she doesn’t like it very much at all.  She’d offered him a chance, though, and he hadn’t taken the bait.  This is simply who they are now, they both have to get used to it.  "I didn't do this," she offers with pursed lips as he regards her.  "The man who did is named Sonny Park and he usually works out of Shanghai."

He looks at her for a long time then, hands loose by his side and his scarf flapping in the winter wind that's cutting through Jamie's jacket like it isn't even there as well.  She's not going to be the one to blink first.  "Why do you care about this so much, Ir-" and he stops himself and stares hard at her for a moment.  "Should I call you Jamie now, or would you rather I not be that familiar, Moriarty?"

She shrugs.  "It's a name, same as any.  It's what you do with them that counts."  She smiles then, and this one feels almost genuine, all teeth and malicious intent.  He should be afraid of Moriarty, the whole world should tremble in that name’s wake.  As Moriarty, she is a force to be reckoned with, after all.  She regards Sherlock for a moment before letting out a quiet sigh and explaining, "People surprise me so infrequently that I place a premium on those who can succeed in doing just that.  Until I understand how she did it, I have no interest in anything other than her continued presence in your life, Sherlock."

"The man who brought that barrel to the storage facility was one of your men, wasn't he?" Sherlock asks.  He's been up half the night watching security footage then; it explains the bags under his eyes.  It probably also explains why Watson was running so early.  Irritation wells up in her, Westin had been an idiot for doing anything other than going straight to a doctor with that wound.  She didn’t pay him to play errand boy for serial killers.

Jamie sniffs.  "Mr. Park didn't take kindly to being told to back off.  My associate paid the price." And she's trying to make it clear in her posture that she doesn't like it one bit.  Sherlock can be a bit thick, but she's not lying when she says that she's not happy with the situation.  "It's a shame really; I had thought I knew his price."

"I don't want to accept your help," Sherlock says.  He scowls at her and juts his chin out accusingly. "Seeing as you're the reason that she caught his attention."

"Oh I wouldn't say that," Jamie replies tersely.  While she was waiting for Westin to come back with Park's response, she'd done some digging into Sherlock's recent cases.  There are no promising leads, but there's an interesting trend.  "You've been sticking your nose into business you should not involve yourself with, haven't you?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Three weeks ago," She explains, her eyes steady as she can see his beautiful mind start to work, to race in that wonderful way it does when it’s presented with a new clue to the puzzle.  "You aided in the capture of a French national named Jack Renard who'd been smuggling Chinese knock-off iPhones into the city."  She pulled her hand from her pocket and tucked a strand hair that had fallen into her eyes back behind her ear.  He watches her with guarded eyes.  "Mr. Renard works for people who do not take kindly to interference."

"People like you."  It isn't a question, or even a barb.  It's a simple statement of fact that Jamie cannot argue with.  It's alright, she rather likes the fact that he's got this part of her at least somewhat figured out, even if he's totally blind to so much of her.

She doesn't, however, dignify him with a response.  "The organization that Mr. Renard works for has been attempting to move into New York for years now.  I've kept them out, but as I have been away from the office for a few months..." She trails off, giving him an appraising look.  "I'm not sure if they would stoop so low as to involve a civilian in their petty turf war, but I did have a mandate that in this city you were not be harmed.  Perhaps that is why they took your dear Ms. Watson, Sherlock, because they couldn't hurt you without fear of my wrath."

Sherlock shifts from foot to foot.  "Then they've miscalculated.  As you clearly have as much of an interest in her safety as I do."  Jamie turns then, and starts to walk away.  She cannot let him know that he’s guessed at least part of her motivation and she keeps her expression as neutral as possible as she leaves. 

She hears, rather than sees him takes two hurried steps, his fingers closing around her shoulder.  She lets herself be turned around when she wants to throw him off.  He doesn't get to touch her anymore, they've burnt that bridge. "I should turn you in; I should - I should take you back to prison."

She smiles fondly at him, and rises on her toes to kiss his cheek.  She hates that she still is so soft around him, but he's hers and hers alone.  Her most beautiful toy, forever in need of winding up.  "But you won't, will you?"

"Will you help me find her?" He asks, and now he's defiant.  She wants to tell him that she'll turn the world upside down to find her most perfect foe, but he doesn't need to know that.  "Please..."  He understands the urgency of the situation, it’s evident in his voice, what Jamie isn’t sure of is why he’s willing to so much as ask, rather than telling her to shove off. 

Perhaps he’s not as strong as she’s come to believe.

She doesn't say anything, and brushes past Detective Bell as he approaches Sherlock with a notebook in hand and a curious expression on his face.  He'll have an answer soon enough.

-

Joan wakes up with a pounding headache.  Disoriented, she struggles to force herself into an upright position, a deep wave of fear welling up within her.  Her sneakers scrabble on the tile floor of the place where she’s laying and her back slams against a cement wall.  Joan’s eyes go wide, staring around the small room.  She has no idea how she got here, and her heart is thudding in her chest. 

From somewhere above her, something is dripping and oozing down the back of her shirt. She raises a hand to touch the wetness and winces as her fingers touch warm, wet blood.  Head wound.  Explains the headache. All she can hear is the sound of her own heartbeat, pounding in her ears and making it almost impossible to think.  She has to think.  She has no idea where she is or how she got here. 

Joan tries to keep her neck as still as possible turning her whole body to get a look around.  She’s in what appears to be a utility closet in some sort of industrial building.  There are wire shelving units lining two of the walls, stacked high with rolls of cheap toilet paper and paper towels.  Above it there are few containers of what Joan suspects are full of hand soap.  A mop bucket (but no mop) is shoved into the corner opposite her.  Joan is leaning up against a third, bare wall with an exposed pipe overhead. 

The pipe is dripping a steady stream of water down the back of her sweatshirt, and the feel of the cold water slowly seeping down her clothing and onto the skin of her back is enough to make Joan shift away from it and huddle in the furthest corner of the room.  She draws her knees protectively up to cover her chest and tries to take deep, calming breaths.  She has to stay calm, rational, or she’s never going to get out of this.

On the other side of the small room, a door looms large and tall before her, and there’s only a little light coming from the window above it.  It’s enough that Joan can see, but frosted over so she has no way of discerning her whereabouts. 

Her first thought, once she straightens enough to find herself staring resolutely at the door handle and wondering if she can find something to pick the lock with on the dirty floor of this closet, is that Moriarty is behind this.  She soon dismisses the idea, because Moriarty has a certain flair for the dramatic, and wouldn’t go to the trouble of knocking Joan out only to lock her away once more. No, she’d probably sidle up to Joan on the street and politely inquire as to her health before offering her a seat beside her in some unremarkable sedan.  No, this lacks Morality’s brazen disregard for all sorts of proper criminal convention and has all the makings of something else entirely.

Joan slumps back against the wall, feeling the wound at the back of her head with tentative fingers.  It’s an impressive lump, on top of still being a bit sticky with blood, and given how much trouble she’s having processing information, Joan is pretty sure that she has a concussion.  Her mind feels sluggish and addled and she knows that she mustn’t fall asleep.  She has to remain awake and the prospect seems daunting as she stares up at the window over the door. 

Although it hurts her head to do so, Joan tries to think of who could have taken her, and horror starts to well up from the base of her stomach.  It grips her, holding her fast and rendering her unable to think of anything else.  She knows better than to jump to conclusions, but if she’s right then she’s been right about everything thus far.  And it means she doesn’t have much time at all.

This has never happened before, and she’s never even though it might be a risk she’d be running.  It's always been fairly smooth sailing with Sherlock.  There are tense situations, and definitely confrontations with the sorts of people who would have Joan's mother in fits.  She doesn't quite know what to do in this situation other than desperately try to stay calm.  They’ve already failed Jessica Delhaney, and she’s not about to let herself become Sonny Park’s next victim.

Something vibrates against her leg and she lets out a quiet gasp and flinches away from the feeling.  Her heart is pounding, racing like she’s just run five miles, just from feeling and hearing it buzz there.  She lowers her hand down to touch the zipped inside sweatshirt pocket where she usually keeps her phone and keys.  They wouldn't have been so stupid, would they?

Her phone is gone, though.  And Joan finds herself thanking the stars that she's had to adapt to keeping her phone's memory as empty as possible for when Sherlock inevitably fills his up with crime scene photos.  Her old, barely functioning, first generation iPod Touch is somehow still in her pocket, and there's an indication that it's connected to an unsecured wireless network somewhere nearby.

Joan moves slowly, her fingers ginger but steady as she works it out of her pocket fully and stares down at the screen.  It's cracked now, shattered to the point where she can barely see her reflection with the screen off.  They must have thought that she'd been listening to her phone when they'd taken her headphones.  She clicks the music player to life and stares down to see that she has almost no battery and that she has an email notification.

One new message.

Inside the message there is a single period, nothing more.  There's no subject and the sender is a spoofed series of numbers and letters.  Joan sighs and clicks out of it, watching as what little that was left of the battery flicks out of existence.  She lets out a low curse and is about to throw the device across the room in frustration when she thinks better of it.  It had been so stupid, why check it, why not try and send an email out to Sherlock.  Why not try and give him _something -_ a signal to trace, an area to search.  Why open a nothing email?

Shifting her weight, Joan wedges the iPod into the hidden pocket at the back of her leggings where it will be covered by two layers of fabric and tears a bit of the base off her t-shirt (which, she realizes far too late, is actually Sherlock’s), and gingerly dabs at the back of her head.  Very little blood comes away on the damp white fabric, which Joan knows is a good sign.

Now she has to stay awake until someone comes in, maybe then she'll be able to quell some of the rising levels of panic that are starting to well up within her.

She stares down at her hands, right index finger pointing to and naming each bone in turn, one after another, until she's named them all.

-

Jamie has known about the PKE Group's want to get into the New York market for close to five years now.  They’ve tried approaching her organization several times regarding possible revenue sharing and each time, Jamie has spurned their advances.  It isn’t that she’s particularly invested in the city; it’s more the people _in_ it.  Before she’d happened upon Sherlock Holmes in London, she honestly couldn’t have cared less about the business that they were running in New York.  Despite being such a center of the world, New York contains only a small fraction of the empire that she has spent most of her life building. 

Now though, with New York being Sherlock’s home, Jamie has enforced her claim on the city rather ruthlessly in recent months.  There are grudges that she’s forged and bridges that she’s burned without a second thought.  Her only want, and her continued wish, is to keep Sherlock close.  She’d rather he go back to London, as it is where Jamie has the most control and where she knows she can keep him safe and under control.  He won't go back though, his brother’s moved into his flat on Baker Street and all of his things are in storage.  He's established here, and she's come to accept that while sitting in a jail cell.

It seems that PKE, however, has other ideas.  They’ve obviously made some incursions into the city, and they’ve already crossed paths with Sherlock and Joan Watson.  Jamie’s honestly a little surprised that neither of them put together the true scope of the PKE Group’s operation.  Sherlock had found traces of her organization almost everywhere he looked, when he’d bothered to _look._ Why wouldn’t he do the same thing for a lesser opponent?

She calls Sam Westin while standing under the awning of an art supply store.  A roll of canvas is tucked under her free arm, resting comfortably against the laptop case that has become far more of a hindrance than the convenient prop it was before.

"I need you to organize a meeting with Peddicort, as soon as possible," Jamie says in lieu of a proper greeting. She shifts slightly and stares down a man across the street who's eyeing her a little bit too closely for her tastes.  He looks away and her lips twitch upwards.  Men are all the same, it seems, and all it takes is a pretty smile or a steady glare and they’ll shuffle on their way.  They don’t like women in power.

Westin makes an affirmative noise and there's the sound of fingers flying over keys in the background.

An idea occurs to Jamie then, and it's brazen enough that she thinks it might just get them what they want. She has to get Peddicort to call off his man, Joan Watson has no business being his collateral.  She is Jamie’s to solve, a puzzle that Jamie can’t put together just yet.  There are more pieces, she knows it.  Still, she’ll be damned if she’s going to let the PKE Group’s board take away her new favorite vexation.  "Actually, don't bother, I'll do it myself."

"Are you sure that's wise?"  Westin asks.

"The man is ruled by ego, Mr. Westin, where's the fun if I can't flatter him a bit before I kill him for what he's done?"  Jamie says with all the casualness of one commenting on the weather.  Her eyes narrow and she shifts from foot to foot.  The man across the street is back to looking at her.  She hasn’t seen her face in the papers yet, and she’s pretty sure that the police are keeping the news of her escape quiet until they can locate Watson.   Pity that they both took place at the same time, she does love a chase.  "Send me a car and Mr. Collins, since you're out of commission."

"I can't, mum," Westin says.  "Collins has gone to home to Glasgow, his mum died."

Margaret Collins, 68, terrible ovarian cancer, Jamie recalls.  She has a dutiful, if decidedly criminal, son.  It is a shame he isn't available, he's one of the best bodyguards she employs. "I thought the prognosis was good?"

Westin makes a negative sound.  "She took a turn for the worse when you were..."

"Oh, how tragic." Jamie says, and she does feel for the man.  He'd been so elated when he'd mentioned on their way back from a job that she'd gone into a remission.  Normally she didn't encourage that sort of social interaction, but she'd been monitoring the situation closely to see if she was going to need to sit Collins until he wasn't so emotionally compromised.  "Send me Sheng then."

"Yes mum," he says and hangs up.  Jamie hitches the canvas up under her shoulder and starts the walk back to the safe house.  The day has turned bitterly cold and she has to see if her inquiry from earlier that morning had resulted in an uplink and results.

-

When she steps back out into the wind and cold two hours later, Jamie feels far more like herself than she's felt in the past few days. She's never been much of one for hiding in plain sight, or for trying to be as unremarkable as possible.  That's the role that a fugitive plays.  Not someone who is untouchable.  And she must appear to be untouchable to capture the king.

She nods once at Sheng, who closes the door behind her, and sits quietly in the back seat, scrolling through the results of her inquiry on her phone and tapping her clutch against her knee.  The inquiry she’d sent earlier had proven fruitful, and she's happy that Park's people are apparently stupid enough to leave a hostage with a wireless capable device after kidnapping them.

Park wouldn't be that stupid, Jamie reasons.  He has a stellar reputation for one in his line of work; he's just always chosen to align himself with others, rather than her organization.  It is a ploy to get Sherlock to bite on it, to follow the signal and get them together where they can't be rescued.

The next part is the fun part for Jamie, and she relishes the opportunity to stand in Nigel Peddicort's way as he comes out of a Duane Reed with a packet of cigarettes in one hand and a scowl on his face.  He looks like any other stockbroker in this town, and that grates on Jamie's nerves.  They're better than everyone else in this city, and they should act the part, rather than trying to blend in. Subtlety doesn’t suit people like them in situations like this one.

"Mr. Peddicort," Jamie says smoothly.  She steps into his field of vision and what little color there still is in his cheeks drains like she's sucked all the color from his world.  "I don't believe that we've ever had the pleasure of being introduced."

His eyes narrow and Jamie feels the irritation rise up within her as he tries to play off of the casual way she's approached him.  "I'm sorry," he says, and his accent as clipped and perfect.  "Have we met?"

Jamie steps forward and into Nigel Peddicort's personal space.  She can smell the cologne and cheap cigarettes on him, and her nose wrinkles.  He smells like an airport bar when he’s far too wealthy to be frequenting such an establishment.  "You know who I am, Mr. Peddicort."

Sheng looms darkly behind her and Peddicort takes in Jamie's stoic expression and his eyes widen.  His eyes flick up to Sheng before they come back to rest on Jamie’s face.  "But you..."

"Perhaps," Jamie replies smoothly.  She wants to keep him guessing, because he's bound to come to the wrong conclusion. She inclines her head to the car and he takes one staggering step forward before pausing and Jamie's caught thinking of another conversation so similar to this one that she can almost taste the warmer, cleaner-smelling air of Brooklyn, and not the foul smell of Midtown.

There's a void there now, shrouded in darkness and confusion.  Jamie doesn't understand why she cannot move past this, and she hates that it's distracting her now.  She’d been defeated at her most perfect game there, and yet she is almost desperate to help the one person who can ruin all of her best-laid plans.  She hates the confusion; it has no place in her life.  She’s a creature of confidence and of ego; she knows that she’s better than everyone she meets.

Save, apparently, Joan Watson.

Jamie shakes her head, irritated, at Peddicort’s back.  She cannot be distracted right now. 

Peddicort gets into the car and Jamie slides in next to him.  He eyes her with trepidation and she smiles slyly at him.  "Your organization has taken something that belongs to me, Mr. Peddicort."  She pulls her gun smoothly from her bag and levels it at him, eyes cold and hard.  Jamie will not let him take her downfall from her, not until she can understand how Joan Watson had come to know her so well.  "I'd like it back."

He looks at the gun for a long time before turning to stare out the window.  "I can't help you," he replies.  "It's out of my hands now. Shoot me if you like, it won't change anything."

And Jamie falls into silence as well, gun feeling heavy in her hands.  She doesn't know why she's surprised.  Sonny Park is a loner, he doesn't play well with others, and the PKE Group is just like her organization in that regard.  There are rules, however few, and some people simply cannot abide by them.  "I want your people out of New York," she says at length. "You have no business here that you cannot earn ten-fold in India or China.  Your drugs are not as potent or as common as the Mexicans’ and your guns could never match the Russians.  This is a town for those with power, Mr. Peddicort, you are out of your depth."

He stares at her then, weak, watery blue eyes shining with an emotion she cannot place.  It's not fear, no, it's something else entirely.  "I had no idea he would take a second," he says and his voice is a reedy almost-whimper.  He’s fixating on the gun.  Good.  "He was only contracted to take the first."

She wants to shoot him; he's useless to her now.  It would start a war with the PKE Group and she doesn't need that headache right now.  She'll crush them on her own time, not the ticking clock at the back of her head that belongs solely to Joan Watson.  She lowers the gun and sets it on her lap.  "Tell your board, Mr. Peddicort.  Your business in New York is finished. I will not be so kind next time."

Sheng stops the car and he gets out in a hurry, scrambling onto Fifth Avenue in the middle of a crowd of tourists.  Jamie leans forward, a wicked grin on her lips.  "Next time," she says, "I would consider going through a different contractor.  Mr. Park is rather unreliable."

He stares at her, and she leans forward, closing the door and Sheng pulls back into traffic. "Where to?" he asks after a few minutes idling behind a long light at the corner of Broadway and Sixth.

Jamie debates it for a moment, before she tells him Sherlock's address.  There is more to this than she'd initially thought.  This isn't revenge about revenge then, this is a crime of opportunity, which makes it far more dangerous. 

And she’s running to Sherlock because he has to know something more, something that she can use to fix this before it all goes catastrophically wrong.

-

On the floor in the middle of Sherlock's living room there is a box that contains case notes: a murder case where a drug dealer got shot and some cases that look like they could be Park's previous work in the city.  Jamie sits before the hearth; legs curled up under her, her coat carefully draped over the arm of the couch, and reads the case notes from the first file with interest.  A police officer witnessed the shooting, Jess Delhaney's husband.  It seems as though this was why Mr. Park was contracted, and it has nothing to do with what they'd done to the PKE Group previously.

The door opens and she looks up to see Sherlock with his scarf half off, frozen in place.  Behind him, the door is still standing open, letting in the cold air and the blustery, icy cold wind that’s been cutting through her clothing since this hellish day started.  She has no idea where his manners went, but she blames his spending _far_ too much time in America, surrounded by rude Americans.   Yet another reason whys he wants him back in London, yet another reason it can never come to pass.

Jaime raises an eyebrow.  "This place is cold enough as it is, must you let the heat out?"

"This isn't your house," he replies, all tense anger, but he does lean back and push the door closed.  Jamie closes her eyes, listening to the windowpanes rattle with the force of his push.  She pushes herself to her feet, case file still in hand and waits for the anger of the door slamming to fade into a version of Sherlock that she knows far too well – the kind that is fascinated with puzzles and has more questions than answers, always.  Once she has that, she’ll have his attention, and she figure out what he’s discovered.

She won't admit that she'd been wrong, that Park is truly working on his own.  She'd been so positive that this had been in retribution for what they'd done to the PKE Group.  She’s usually able to see through plans like the simplistic, uncomplicated ones that a man like Sonny Park would make effortlessly.  She doesn’t understand why she’s stumbling, or if she’s somehow gotten rusty while in prison.

He hangs up his jacket and stands at the entrance to the room, his face a stormy mess.  He folds his arms over his chest, a picture of defiance.  Jamie’s proud; he hasn’t crumbled at her presence yet.  They’re moving forward, slowly but surely.  "Why are you here?" he asks.  “And tell me why I shouldn’t call the police right now.”

"Because she's running out of time," Jamie explains. The case file in her hand is held open to the page with a picture of the emblem stamped on the drugs that Officer Ling had recovered at the murder scene.  She flips it around to show him.  "I've just had a most illuminating conversation with one of the five board members of the PKE Group," she explains.  Sherlock's lip twitches and she shakes her head. She’s not sure that he knows the name, but he’s giving no outward sign that its new information to him.  He’s getting better at hiding his emotions from her.  It’s a troubling concept to Jamie, and she tries to not dwell on it just yet.  "He's still intact, if that's what you're worried about, if anything they're probably clearing out as we speak."

"Why?"

"Because New York is mine."  There doesn't need to be any explanation beyond that.  Sherlock has guessed and prodded at the edge of her organization before, and he knows just how far she's willing to go to get her away.  It's just a matter of time before he realizes that she's never going back to jail.  “And they should have known better than to come here in the first place.”

"What did he tell you?” 

"Mr. Park was contracted to make sure that Officer Ling here didn't talk," she says, dropping the case file back down into the box and folding her arms over her chest.  "Whatever's happened to Ms. Watson was a ... miscalculation on their part.  Park likes to do things in twos.  They should have known that."

He slumps down onto the couch, moving her coat out of the way without thinking, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palm.  "So you're nowhere."  He seems to crumple a bit, his whole body folding in on itself. His eyes are watery and exhausted-looking and he swipes moodily at them before adding, “We’re nowhere too.”

"I wouldn't say that," Jamie replies.  She steps around the box and to the clutch she's left under her coat.  She pulls out her phone and clicks into the tracer program before sitting down next to Sherlock.  "Your Ms. Watson runs with a separate music player," Jamie says quietly.  She's known about that particular element of Watson's routine for a while now; it's why she sent the ping in the first place.  "Most people just use their phones..."

He stares at the radiating dot on the map Jamie's pulled up, his jaw working and no sound coming out.  "And you've got at tracking program on it?"  He reaches to take the phone from her, but she snatches it back.  She doesn't want him anywhere near something that could bring about her downfall.  There's enough of that failure housed in this place that it's pressing down around Jamie and she hates it.

They fall into silence then, staring at the map.  Jamie wants to ask him if he'll take the police and go, or if it will be too late for Joan Watson.  It cannot be too late for her, Jamie doesn't understand her yet.

"Why are you doing this?" Sherlock asks, and his voice is quiet and as vulnerable as it ever was before.  "You should be out of the country by now, sitting in a country with no extradition treaty and laughing at our misfortune."

She smiles almost sadly at him.  "You don't know me at all if you think that, Sherlock."  She tilts her head and touches his knee.  He's been one of the few people she's ever allowed to be close to her, even if that image of herself was a half-truth.  He can see through her, even if she brushes it off as his imagination.  "She makes you better," she says at length.  "And that's interesting to me."

"She's a person," Sherlock says and he sounds almost angry.  Jamie feels her lips curl, and she glances away to hide the smile that's threatening to overshadow her calm. He's so attached, so foolishly attached. "Not some set of variables for you to manipulate."

"What she is," Jamie replies curtly.  "Is running out of time."

It is December 19th and Joan Watson has been missing for twelve hours.

-

The light behind the door doesn’t go out as the hours tick by.  Joan stares up at it like it’s a beautiful stained glass window in a cathedral in Paris, trying to discern meaning from three perfectly square panes of frosted glass.  There is no meaning, and she’s a fool for trying to find meaning in it. 

She’s made a list of what she knows is certain.  It’s a surprisingly short list and she’s pursed her lips and rummaged all around the room, looking for a spare paperclip, a bit of wire, something she could use to pick the lock on the door and get the hell out of here.

There’s nothing but paper towels and dish soap, and Joan feels rather forgotten.  She’s locked up in a strange room probably in an interior hallway of some office or maybe even industrial building.  She’s not even sure that she’s in New York any more.  None of the boxes on the top shelves have shipping labels on them.  The water that’s dripping from the pipe above her head tastes like New York City water, though, and Joan’s fairly certain that her head would hurt a lot more if she’d been knocked out for long enough to remove her from the city. 

She has a bump on her head, but the swelling’s going down nicely and the wound seems to have scabbed over nicely.  She’s not cold or hot, she’s just there.  Sitting in a storage closet, abandoned and without a clue as to what she’s supposed to be doing there.

And that’s it.  It’s all she knows.  She’s heard no voices, she’s heard no footsteps.  There’s been no sign of anything at all on the other side of the door, and Joan isn’t sure what it means.

She doesn’t dare sleep, her heart is still racing too fast.  It hammers staccato in her chest and she cannot stop shaking when she thinks too hard about why she might be sitting in a storage closet all by herself.  She lets her eyes flutter shut, only to jerk them open once more.  She has to stay awake.  She has to be prepared to fight back, should the person who took her come back. 

It is only forty-five minutes later that Joan falls asleep and somewhere outside the building where she sits hidden away on a seldom-used floor, a clock tolls midnight.  It is December 20th and Joan Watson has been missing for sixteen hours. 


	3. never thought I (ruin the moonlight)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings of note: shit gets a little violent and gross in this chapter. nothing too major, but there's blood and barf and shit like that.

Over the course of her life, Jamie has made a living on ultimatums that end in certain death. It is part of who she is, right down to the very core of her personhood that she keeps sealed away from the world and anyone who might try and find it.  Joan Watson had seen that core, however brief her glimpse of it was, and now Jamie is determined to look the woman in the face once more and try to see how she’d done it. 

She’s never been on the receiving end of an ultimatum as an adult.  They were a singularly unpleasant fixture of her childhood and she’s done her absolute best to ensure that she never has to cope with such a thing ever again.  Such instances do not figure in to her carefully laid plans or her network of informants.  They are not part of her frame of reference and she does not care for the powerless feeling that washes over her as she finds herself facing one for the first time in years. 

It’s after midnight now and she’s starting to feel more and more powerless as the minutes tick by.  Sherlock is unmoved, sitting in front of a web of all the information they collectively have been able to uncover on Sonny Park. 

At the center of it all is the postcard that she’d sent to them, warning them off the case.  Jamie can scarcely believe that she’d sent it and it had arrived so quickly, but a quick text to Westin confirms that it had been hurried along and hand delivered along with that morning’s mail by one of their men in the postal service.  She’s almost impressed, but she’d expect nothing less from the man she had left nominally in charge of her organization while she was away.

Sherlock’s process is every bit as frenetic as it’s always been, and Jamie’s sitting at the back window, scowling out into the alley behind the brownstone, a mug of tea clutched between her palms.  She’s been watching him, trying to make sense of why he’s letting her stay, why he hasn’t called the police.  She’d be gone before he finished the call, but she doesn’t think he will.  No, he needs her because he’s afraid of what might be waiting for them once they figure out a plan of attack.

Jamie is itching to do _something_ , butting up against Sherlock’s ultimatum like a petulant child because she doesn’t want to wait to see if the trace evidence from the storage unit turns up anything conclusive.  It won’t.

The police lab is fast-tracking the reports and they should have been complete hours ago, if the phone call Sherlock received from Detective Bell is anything to go on.  He’d glanced at her, agitated and she’d held up the print out of the map where her inquiry had indicated Joan Watson’s iPod was located.  She’d been greeted with a frustrated look and a muttering into the phone that he wanted to know and soon.

She’s honestly never seen him quite so distraught over something that was not her doing.  It’s strange, she wants to go to him, to touch him and tell him that it will turn out alright.  She’ll be damned if she’s going to let Sonny Park of all people get the better of her, and she’s pretty sure that he knows it.  He hasn’t asked for her gun, after all, only that she not leave the room. 

“You might steal something,” he’d explained and she’d given him a mock-horrified look.  The only thing she intends to steal from him is Joan Watson, but he doesn’t need to know that yet.  She’s not entirely sure that she’ll actually go through with that phase of the plan just yet.  There are so many other factors that she must consider for attempting something so brazen.

Now, though, she wonders if she could slip away and poke through Watson’s things.  He seems to be almost meditating, and Jamie pushes herself off of the back window sill and crosses to the computer.  An idea has struck her, and Sherlock doesn’t look up as she plugs her phone into the USB charger and uses the phone’s embedded encryption to piggyback off of his ISP to get into the INS database that had been mentioned in Wilhelmina Dong’s case file.  She finds the fake social that Sonny Park had provided and uses a program that she’d written herself to back track it to a bank account based out of the Cayman Islands. 

The account details are sketchy, but she finds a record of the storage facility where Westin was shot easily enough after a web searches to ensure that she’s got the right monthly rate.  It’s evidence enough to make her think that she’s found him.  “Sherlock,” she says, not looking up and mentally calculating how much it would cost to rent space in the building.  The payments go back years, well before Wilhelmina Dong’s disappearance.  “I found his bank account, or one of them.”

He perks up at this, and gets to his feet, hissing quietly as his knees pop from sitting in the same position for too long.  She wonders when he’d gone and gotten old on her.  “This isn’t going to bring down the unholy terror that is the American federal government on me, is it?”

She doesn’t answer him, but highlights the lines in question – simple withdrawals of close to eight thousand American dollars done on the first of the month, every month dating back years.  That’s enough to get a small office space in a building such as that, maybe.  She hasn’t ever really been interested in the New York real estate market.  She prefers the anonymity of hotels when she’s not at home.  “This would get you an office space the size of a closet and building access.”

“When I called the building manager last night, they said that the property was mostly vacant at the time being.  They just had a fairly large investment firm move out…” Sherlock leans over her shoulder and eyes the program for a second before he frowns, lips pitching downwards.  “I don’t even want to know how you managed to hack into Cayman bank records.”

“Good,” she replies, glancing down at her phone and hitting the print command on the keyboard.  Once she hears the printer whirr to life, she pulls her phone off of the USB cord and watches as the programs she’d been running close one by one. “I didn’t intend to tell you.”

“Doesn’t solve the problem of where to look once we get into the building, though…” Sherlock trails off, and then bounds away to his wall.  His fingers paw through the evidence of five murders and one disappearance, pulling back articles and looking for something.  Jamie watches him, caught up in his manic energy and his wide and staring eyes.  When he’s like this she thinks she might still love him, but she knows that it can never be again.

It’s three in the morning and it’s snowing outside.  Joan Watson has been missing for nearly twenty hours now. 

**Never Thought I (ruin the moonlight)**

Sonny Park is a broad, muscular guy.  He’s got a wicked-looking knife hanging half-way down his leg in a sheath strapped to his leg and a manic expression on his face.  He doesn’t look anything like the pictures that Joan had seen from Wilhelmina Dong’s case file from when they’d interviewed him, nor does he look much like the man that they’d seen on the storage facility in Vinegar Hill’s security cameras.  He does, however, look exactly like the sort of man that Joan would expect to be a serial killer who did contract work for shadowy crime syndicates. 

He says something to her in Chinese and she stares at him blankly.  Her mother speaks the language just fine, but Joan’s never been very good with it.  Oren was always better than her, at any rate.  It’s always been a source of some contention in her family, because Joan has never really shown much interest in that particular part of her heritage. Joan takes a deep breath and says as calmly as she possibly can, “I don’t understand.”

Park blinks almost stupidly at her, his eyes narrow until it appears that his meaty face nearly swallows them.  His hair is styled and cut like some of the boy bands that she’s seen while wandering around Chinatown after Sherlock when he’s on a quest to find some strange herb that can only be found there.  Joan tells him it’s to keep him from buying supplements and powders that are probably only one or two steps away from actual drugs, but really she just enjoys watching him interact with the people there.  He speaks the language far better than she does, at any rate.

Joan sits with her knees drawn up against her chest and tests the waters tentatively.  “Who are you?” she asks.  She wants to stall, because it’s a logical guess that if he was interested in doing anything with that knife that he’d have it in his hands.  She tries to sound afraid, but she’s stared down far worse than him without flinching.  She’d never realized that it would be so hard to fake.  Her heart is hammering in her chest even still, and she breathes in short, quick breaths through her nose.

“You have friends in high places,” he says, cheeks puffed out like he’s repeating himself.  He glances down at the knife at his waist and folds his arms across his chest.  His English is close to perfect, without so much of a trace of an accent.  “I’m going to have fun with you.”

Whatever fear that Joan wasn’t feeling is quashed by the feeling of unmitigated dread that hits her like a gunshot, cutting her confidence down where it stands.  She has no idea why Sherlock hasn’t found her yet – or why any of this is happening.  All she knows is that this man and his dumb-boy band haircut is going to enjoy spending time with her, and she can’t help but think the worst.

She swallows visibly, looking up into his face and watching as he runs his thumb almost perversely over the handle of the knife at his waist.  “W-what do you mean?” she stammers. 

He bends down then, squatting, and he draws the knife out from its sheath and holds it up for her to see.  “They never think I do things in twos until it’s too late, Ms. Watson,” he laughs.  His teeth are crooked, but perfectly white.  Sharp and glinting with malicious intent, Joan tries to push herself further back into the wall.  “I have to, you see.  It always takes one girl to get truly warmed up for the second.” 

It takes all her willpower not to lash out and hit him.  She wants to lunge forward and tackle him, to shove the knife forward and up, under his ribcage and into his lungs.  He’d drown then, and she almost thinks it’s a fitting end for a man like him.  She’s shaking, her eyes can’t focus and he’s dragging the knife up her arm, cutting into the thick fabric of her sweatshirt and then into her arm.  With each rip, Joan feels like it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, she scarcely feels the pain and doesn’t dare look away from Park.  She tries to force air into her lungs and sits there, shaking and fearful, as she looks into the face of who must surely be her death. 

Sherlock was too late, Joan sees this now.  A sob escapes her lips and she feels the knife press against her throat.  Pressure and blood and oh god—

A telephone rings the default Nokia tone that’s been burned into Joan’s memory from her residency.  It sounds in the distance and Park lets out a curse that Joan knows well from when her father gets angry.  He’s gone as he came in, silent and scowling, the door locking with an audible click of a deadbolt behind him. 

Joan lets out a shuttering breath and collapses forward, retching what little there is left in her stomach all over the floor beside her.

-

Sheng drives them to their destination and Sherlock makes no comment as Jamie checks and then rechecks her gun before holstering it under her coat once more.  He knows, as does she, that direct involvement is not usually her speed; they both know she prefers to dirty her hands as little as possible.  Jamie is almost expecting him to comment on it, but he holds is tongue.  He sits with his fingers bridges together, cradling his phone and staring at the time as if he’s counting down.  It is four thirty in the morning and Jamie can feel exhaustion starting to sneak up on her now.  She keeps her eyes forward, knowing that there must be dark circles under her eyes and not really wanting to know what they might mean.

She doesn’t know why she’s doing this, why she’s risking her very freedom to a man who has proven that he can be unpredictable and certainly wants her locked up far away from him.  She doesn’t trust him, but she’s watched him for close to twelve frantic hours now and she knows that the only thing he cares about right now is getting Joan Watson back.  It works to her advantage well, Jamie thinks tiredly, because it means that he’s suitably distracted.

Jamie has found her endgame.  She knows what she must do, and she’s gone so far as to get Sherlock to tacitly agree to it without fully understanding what she’s asking.  There is a web of lies that grows out from her and makes her its queen, and she wants to know the lie that is most precious to her heart.

Does Joan Watson truly believe that she still loves Sherlock Holmes?

(And when Jamie lies to herself and says that she doesn’t on any level, does Joan Watson see that as well?)

She does love Sherlock; he is her beautiful mind – her favorite toy.  And somehow, Joan Watson makes him even better.  She has to know why.  She wants to know Joan Watson.

At four-forty-five, Sherlock hits a number in his contacts and raises the phone to his ear as Sheng idly hums along to the Christmas carol that’s playing on the radio.  They’re at a stoplight, about to turn onto the highway and then it’s over the bridge and into Manhattan once more.  The building they want is in the Financial District, and Jamie’s willing to bet that Park is there now.  From what she knows of him, he’s a night owl, same as Sherlock and Joan Watson.

The phone pulses twice before a sleepy voice – Marcus Bell – answers on the other end.  Jamie pretends to not listen as Sherlock speaks in quick, efficient sentences.  He explains what they’ve found out, leaving Jamie and tracing bank activity on offshore accounts, and says that he’s going to go see if he can get Joan out without confronting Park.  “I understand,” he says, chewing at his lip and staring off into the middle distance.  “I… I think the most important thing is to get her out of there.  We can find Park again, but – but she must be _found_ before anything happens to her.” There’s muffled cursing and then a question.  Sherlock sighs quietly and then says in a small, almost tired-sounding voice that doesn’t suit him at all, “Bell, listen, I am not running off on some hunch, I know exactly where Joan is and I’m going to go get her.” 

He glances over at Jamie, who raises a single eyebrow and rests her chin on her palm, elbow propped up against the armrest that’s built into the door.  “Yes I will call you, but I don’t think that Mr. Park will be much of a problem.”  He hangs up before Bell can question him further and tucks his phone into his pocket after setting it to silent and making sure that Jamie sees him do it.

“Mr. Park is not going to be a problem?” Jamie asks, almost incredulous. She wants to throw back her head and laugh, for she’s finally corrupted the principled and good Sherlock Holmes, but she knows better than to tip her hand just yet.  She plays it off as annoyance, irritation even that he’d suggest she kill an asset that might prove useful.  She won’t tell him that Park signed his death warrant the moment that he’d taken Jess Delhaney.  Murders for hire _do not_ happen in New York without her say so, and Jamie is going to make that point abundantly clear to all those who care to look.

Sherlock doesn’t respond, but the line of his jaw tightens and she wonders if this is what he looked like to Moran, strung up and willing to kill for sweet, innocent Irene.  This is the face of a man who is willing to go the distance.

She wonders if Sherlock has ever thought about becoming a killer.  She thinks he’d be excellent at it. 

The building looms large above them as Sheng pulls up to the front door and lets the car idle.  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asks.

Sherlock pops up, waving him off with a cheery, if empty smile.  “Won’t be necessary, but please be prepared to call the authorities if we don’t come down in what--”

"Twenty minutes," Jamie supplies with a single nod to Sheng.  She doesn't want the police swarming the place without proper warning.  He will warn her in the usual way, then.  Jamie's rather satisfied with how easily he's slipped into the role of driver and bodyguard now that Collins isn't around and Westin is out of commission.

There are surveillance cameras on the outside of the building that Jamie's noted as she stands under the awning of the building across the street.  She hates that so much of this plan that Sherlock's cooked up relies on her getting caught on camera.  She simply doesn't operate that way, and Jamie's scowling at Sherlock just thinking about it.

"You're ruining my reputation," she grumbles as Sherlock stares up at the building with a closed off and almost angry expression on his face.

He chuckles then.  "I believe that Watson did that.  She solved you, after all."  An almost rueful smile twists across his lips and he adds, "I don't think I could ever ruin you anyway, that's your job."

Jamie tugs her hat off and shoves it into her pocket.  Her hair is frizzing up, a halo of gold in the streetlight above her head.  Her breath fogs and there's snow swirling around them, melting on the pavement.  She wants to say something grand, to inspire him so that she can tear him down for it later - but she doesn't want his beautiful mind thinking too hard about why she's doing this.

She doesn't want to be faced with having to explain herself to him.  She doesn't have a good brush-off that will dissuade his attention, so avoiding the subject completely seems like the wisest choice.  She doesn’t like the idea of not _knowing_ and yet knowing at the same time.  She thinks it takes a degree of uncertainty on her part to slip things by Sherlock, and she’s not entirely settled on what she’s going to do, quite yet.

They approach the building from different sides, there are two possible floors where Watson could be, each with access on different sides of the building as the first sets of elevators only go up so far. Sherlock's loaned her a set of lock picks and has told her that she must give them back.  They belong to Joan, he explains, she should have had them with her when she'd gone running.

He's taught her so many things without even realizing it.  Picking locks was an afternoon's distraction between sex and wine and paint smeared down her cheek and across his chest.  He'd showed her and had watched with wonderment as she'd let herself into every locked door she came across.  He’d never expected her to pry open his ribs and steal his own heart out from inside him.  That had been her greatest triumph.

She pockets the picks and takes an elevator on the other side of the building from where the office is supposedly located. On a program somewhat similar to one that Jamie herself had used on several occasions, Sherlock had been able to locate the unsecured wireless network that Watson’s iPod had connected to.  They’d narrowed it down to two possible floors; Jamie is going to take the first, Sherlock the second, lower, floor.  She glances up and makes sure her face is clearly visible on the security camera's footage, and can't resist smiling with teeth and malicious intent as she steps onto the elevator.

The upper floors are stripped down and impersonal.  When Jamie steps out of the elevator that had brought her this far, she is faced bank of six elevators and faceless white-washed hallways with locked doors and security keycard panels on either side. Jamie steps around a fake potted plant – the lone decoration - and stares at the only door without keycard access.

The lock doesn't even require picking.  She jiggles the handle and finds that it's open and her eyes narrow.  She pushes it forward with her foot, staying carefully out of the way, watching for a trip wire or an ambush.  When none comes, she slips inside and closes the door behind her.

The room is dark, the only light coming from a computer screensaver that flashes the Windows XP logo over and over again.  There are two chairs shoved against the wall, one of which has a thick winter jacket with a Chinese label sewn into its back tossed casually over the back of it.  There is a duffle bag that contains a phone with no calls going in or out – a burner probably - and a change of clothes that also have Chinese labels.

_He's here then_ , Jamie thinks. _Good._

-

Joan has gotten unsteadily to her feet, stepping away from the corner Park had backed her into.  The realization that a rescue might not actually be coming has hit her slowly, as she's pushed herself up with shaking hands.  She’s been so fixated on holding out hope – Sherlock and Marcus have never let her down before – but the hours have ticked by and Park has already threatened her once.  She doesn’t know how much time she has left.  The urge to vomit is still strong and she's trying to keep herself calm by drawing in slow, rattling breaths.

She doesn't know how much longer she can keep this up before she loses her cool completely.  There's nothing in here that she can use for a weapon.  Joan eyes the industrial grade bottles of hand soap on the shelving unit just to her left and wonders how much it would hurt to get a face full of the stuff.

Would it give her time to run?  Did she even have enough time for that?

The questions keep coming and the self-doubt is enough to make her want to collapse back into her corner next to the sick and fear of the confrontation earlier.  She can't be resigned to her fate, she knows that.  Sherlock wouldn't be, and she has to survive long enough to be rescued, she knows that.  He is coming for her, he must be.

Her skin feels cold and clammy and she's still shaking.  She's probably having the beginnings of a panic attack; the only thing keeping her from collapsing completely is the breathing.  She sticks with it, sucking in deep breaths and reaching up to take a container of the soap down from the shelf.

Her hands are shaking but she manages to get the top off, her heart hammering as she pours the stuff all over the floor by the entrance.  She hopes that it will work, that he'll step inside and slip in the dim light of the room long enough for her to duck around him and get away.

It's the best plan she has, and she stands in the corner by the door and prepares to ensure that he does fall.

Her breath comes in short, uneven gasps, and she focuses on her shoes and counts to five between each inhale and exhale.  She has to stay strong; she has to get herself out of this.

-

Park is talking on a cellphone in rapid Mandarin, standing before a window that looks out over the river.  Jamie stands in the shadows, silent and watchful.  She's biding her time, waiting until he shows her exactly where he's put Joan Watson. Her watch is showing a countdown, they've been in here ten minutes already.  He's got to hurry up or Sheng might actually go through with his promise to Sherlock and call the police.

She listens as Park thanks whomever is on the phone and watches as he hangs up and flips the phone over in his hands, removing the SIM-card and breaking it in half before pocketing the phone and tossing the broken card into the bin under the desk he’s standing by.  Jamie watches as he stares out the window for a moment before, turning to head down a dimly lit hallway.  Jamie waits, there's no cover where he's headed.

There's a beat of three deep breaths before she schools her face perfectly neutral and raises the gun in her hands.  Park is fiddling with keys, jamming one into a non-descript looking door with a window of frosted glass above it.  He's whistling, almost cheerful sounding as he does it.  She supposes that it's meant to instill fear, to be intimidating. 

A bullet to the head works wonders for that, and it doesn't require any wasted breath.  Jamie has never been a particular fan of the serial killer showmanship that so many seem to be fascinated with.  Park had appealed to her with his vanish-without-a-trace methods, but it seems that she'd underestimated his ability to be subtle.  Pity he won't ever have the chance to learn to correct himself.

He gets the door open and steps inside, speaking once more.  Jamie steals down the corridor and stands across the hallway, peering into the dim light of what appears to be a storage closet.

There is something slick and sticky-looking on the floor that smells faintly of lemons.  Soap, her mind tells her, and she knows what Joan Watson is about to do, and she's even braver than Jamie thought.  She has half a mind to sit back and see if Watson can get out of this herself, but Park's hand has shot out into the darkness to his right and there's the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

He's speaking, low and quiet and surprisingly in English.  Jamie's intel said that Watson spoke Park's language fairly well.  Odd.

"That was almost clever," he says, and his boots dig into the slime just enough to get him on uneven footing.  There's a strangled noise and Jamie knows that she can't take any more time to give Watson a chance to save herself.

All the energy that she's been saving explodes out of Jamie in a flurry of movement that again fills her mind with the question of why she's doing this.

It's then that the answer comes to her.  She's doing this because she wants to prove to Joan Watson that she can be every bit as surprising as Joan Watson is to her.  She wants Watson to think, to question everything she knows about Jamie. It's only then that Jamie can maybe begin to understand her.

The storage closet is small; two shelving units dominate the space. They're full of paper towels and non-descript boxes.  There are jugs of soap on the topmost shelf and Jamie is fairly certain that that is where the stuff on the floor has come from.

She sees Joan Watson's eyes go wide as she steps into view and levels the gun at Park's knee.  It's so simple to pull the trigger and destroy his leg in a simple silenced gunshot. The bullet buries itself in soft flesh and the bone, cutting through ligaments and lodging itself right where Jamie wants it. He’ll never walk properly again. She smiles as she does it, watching as Park collapses to the soap colored floor.  He's clutching his knee with one hand, and Watson is standing as if paralyzed, eyes wide with shock.

Park has a knife strapped into a holster at his belt and the anger that rises within Jamie when she sees the bruises already forming around Watson's neck and the cuts that run down her arm comes from a place that Jamie doesn't recognize.  She wants to avenge them, almost.  Park has no business in this town without her say so, and he certainly has no business targeting her dearest enemy.

"I warned you," Jamie says. She wants to smile at Joan, like a promise never said and now dutifully fulfilled. She steps forward and places her boot on Park's chest and bends down to take the knife from him. She tosses it back out and into the hallway, smiling manically as it clatters to the floor. She levels her gun at his chest and turns to look at Watson.

There are dark circles under her eyes and the cuts running up the length of her arm look like they’re fairly fresh, blood still oozing from what Jamie thinks is probably the thickest one.  The grey fabric of her sweatshirt stained crimson and murky yellow with blood and sick.  She looks as though she's been crying, her hands shaking as she raises them to touch her neck and ensure that everything is still there.

Park lets out a pitiful moan and Jamie lets her foot up from his chest enough for him to slide towards the far wall of the closet, destroyed knee uselessly dragging behind him. She doesn't look at him, eyes trained on Watson.  She's waiting for Watson to leave, to run screaming so she can kill Park and be done with this hellish day.

"W-why?" Watson asks, her voice sounding hoarse and broken.  It's all wrong and Jamie wants to kill Park a thousand times over for doing this to the one person that Jamie might be able to feel anything other than contempt for.  She debates shooting Park in front of Watson just so he'll shut up.  He's groaning and cursing in quiet Chinese.

She kicks his knee and he yelps, actual tears welling up from his black eyes.  Jamie looks down then, before she lets herself meet Watson's gaze steadily, confidence in every aspect of her expression save where it matters most.  She has no idea how this will play when she says it.  "The world is truly lacking interesting phenomena, dear Watson.  It'd be a shame to lose one such as yourself to such a ... pitiful opponent."  Jamie wrinkles her nose at the last bit.

"You can't kill him," Watson says quickly, reaching out and pushing the gun - Jamie's hand - down and away from Park.  "He has to face justice, to pay for his crimes. The families of all those girls need closure..."  Her fingers linger there and Jamie stares at them for a long moment.

"Watson," Jamie says very calmly, her voice razor sharp.  "Go."

Sherlock will have come up by now, and her time has all but run out.

"You can't," she says again, her eyes wide and pleading.  Jamie doesn't understand how Watson doesn't realize that it is impossible.  Jamie is going to kill this man, she's going to tear him apart and litter his entrails across this whole floor and she's going to revel in the act of doing it.  She cannot simply turn off who she is, and Watson needs to understand this, going forward.

She's going through, stumbling down the hallway and towards the second set of elevators that will put her right into Sherlock's arms.  The plan is all but over, and Jamie watches her leave before she bends, gun dangling almost lazily in her hand.

"Well then, Mr. Park, it seems we are to have a conversation."

He spits in her face.  She shoots him twice more and walks down the fifteen flights of stairs to the lobby where she grinds her teeth and allows herself to be seen once more. Sheng is waiting for her just outside the door, and he speeds off into the night, away from the flashing lights of the oncoming police presence that is sure to get her caught.

-

Joan runs right into Sherlock's arms by the bay of elevators, half stumbling and out of breath.  She lets him hold her and finally feels like she can stop shaking. He smells like tea and sweat and home and she doesn’t want to let him go ever again. Her ears are straining, but she doesn't hear any more gunshots. She does, however, recognize the hard line of Sherlock's jaw and she stares at him for a long time before she lets him step away to take off his coat.  He drapes it over her shoulders and gives her a small smile.  "I've got you," he says, pulling her back into an elevator and punching the lobby button.

They're nearly to the bottom before Joan can speak.

"Moriarty..."  She starts, tilting her aching neck to look at Sherlock.

"Is still running free, I'm sure," Sherlock replies, one hand still resting on her back.  Touching, but not touching, Joan’s grateful.  She doesn’t thinks he could handle him actually touching anywhere else right now.  "My priorities have been a little skewed as of late, Watson."

"No, she was there, upstairs.  She shot Park in the knee and made me leave before she hurt him more."  Joan's eyes are narrowed and she's staring at Sherlock.  He knows; he has to know that she was up there.  Why else would he be here, out of breath and worried looking?  "She found me..."

As the lobby doors open and Sherlock lets go of her long enough to raise his hands in the air and walk out into a police barricade, he chuckles, a look of sudden comprehension on his face.  "That woman..." he says quietly.  "Will be the death of us both, Watson."

Joan follows him out into the flashing lights and chaos of what is an ambush meant for Sonny Park. SWAT teams are leveling machine guns at them, but they lower them as soon as they see Sherlock, smiles erupting across their faces and whoops of celebration that she’s alright.  Joan wants to smile, but she finds herself looking around the room for Marcus, she has to tell him what she knows.

"Fifteenth floor," Sherlock says to Marcus, who comes running up with a blanket and a bottle of water for Joan.  "I don't know if he's alive."

"How do you not know?" Bell demands, eyes wide and almost incredulous.

"I was beaten here by someone, Joan says it was Moriarty," Sherlock says testily.  "Check the security cameras."

"Why would Moriarty..." Bell starts, but the SWAT team is already moving past him and he nods once to them before they head towards the stairs.  Joan stands there with the blanket and the water and takes a long, shuddering breath.

"You knew."

Sherlock turns to look at her then, in a t-shirt and cardigan and looking like hasn't slept in a week.  Red and blue light fill the lobby of the building and they're staring at each other across a space of maybe ten feet.  Joan can't understand why he'd work with her, but she understands that desperation might have left him with no choice.

"She found you," He says, echoing what Joan had said earlier. He stares down at his feet.  "We had two floors that we suspected you could be on, based on the IT Schematic that I found and the wireless network that your iPod picked up on.  We each took one.  She guessed right. I guessed wrong."

She looks away, tugging the blanket around her shoulders.  They both know that Moriarty doesn’t _guess_ anything.  Neither does Sherlock.  "Why would you trust her to help you and not to hurt you?  All she's ever done is hurt you."

He straightens then, rocking on his does and smiling at her.  "Perhaps we reached a détente, at least for this moment of time.  She's probably already leaving the city.  If she's fool enough to stay, I will find her, and, with your help, I will catch her."

-

Joan is sitting at the back of an ambulance outside, repeating answers to questions that she knows are a part of a concussion test, when suddenly there is a flurry of movement inside.  The elevator doors bang open and the second team of paramedics race out of the building, rolling a stretcher that contains what can only be the battered and broken remains of Sonny Park.  She watches with wide eyes as he's loaded up into the second ambulance on the scene and sped away off in the direction of the nearest hospital.  Joan's still a little disoriented and not entirely sure where she is, but she thinks that it might be Beth Israel.

"She didn't kill him..." she mutters and the paramedic that had been asking her the questions blinks stupidly at her.

"What?" he asks.

"Nothing..." Joan trails off, watching the ambulance lights disappear off into the distance with half-closed eyes.

She's half asleep as it is, exhausted beyond anything that she could possibly imagine.  They want to look at the cuts on her arm and give her a tetanus shot and IV fluids overnight, just to make sure that she's okay.  She signs the consent forms and allows herself to be drawn away from the place and into the back of the ambulance.

Sherlock comes over to make sure he knows where she's going and presses his spare phone into her hands.  "If you need me, I will come," he promises and she could hug him if she wasn't so damn tired.  He touches her hand and she squeezes it tightly and lets herself be spirited away to a hospital in the opposite direction of the one that they took Park too.

The ambulance runs without a siren, just lights, and Joan lets her eyes flutter closed.  Her throat aches and her head is pounding, all the adrenaline of the encounter has faded and she's bone-tired.  One thing is still nagging at her as she holds her arm as still as possible.  They don't think that she's going to need stitches, but they want to clean out the wound and have a good look at it before they make that determination.

Moriarty doesn't leave victims alive.  Her plans are perfectly thought out and those who have seen her face do not live to tell the tale.  During the discovery that had landed her in Newgate they'd managed to uncover very little about her that they didn't already know.  She covers her tracks well, and for Park to be alive... it doesn't fit her pattern.

It's surprising.

And Joan doesn’t understand it.

Joan spends the next half-hour listening to a lecture about how (former) doctors are the worst patients.  She gives her social more times than she cares to count, and tells them the name of her insurance company at least three times before they finally find her in the system and can formally admit her.  The triage nurse cleans the cuts on her arm and shoulder and gets her into some clean clothes with a tired smile.

"You've had quite the ordeal," she says and Joan nods sleepily.  They don't have to do any stitches and her arm aches from the tetanus shot they've given her.  She's wrapped up in a warm blanket and her arm is bandaged in pure white gauze.  It's all surreal.

The nurse, her name is Janet, disappears for a moment before she comes back in with a cup of water and two pills.  "I'm not going to make you take these, but they'll knock you out if you're having trouble sleeping."

That will come later, Joan knows, she's too tired for it to be an issue tonight.  She's already half-asleep, her cheek resting on the pillow and Sherlock's spare phone clutched in one hand.

-

Sheng takes her to a hotel out by LaGuardia and Jamie sends him away after assuring him that she'd be fine for the evening.  She tells him to go back to the safe house to clear it out of any trace of her, and puts in a call to Westin.  "I need a plane.  Montreal, I think, and then on to London," she says when he picks up.  He makes a sleepy noise of confirmation and there's a low murmur of a woman's voice before there's nothing.

Jamie scowls out the window at the black night and blinking lights from the airport terminal in the distance.  She's always preferred her underlings to keep their personal relationships private.  She has no business knowing who Westin is finding to nurse his wound back to health, but it is interesting that he has someone.  She clucks quietly under her breath and Westin lets out a nervous chuckle.

"Sorry for waking you up," she says.  She's not sorry in the slightest, he is her employee, and it's his duty to be available to her at a moment's notice. Westin is very good in that regard, he’s never one to complain or grumble and he’s always willing to work the odd hours that the job requires. "Park won't be a problem for us anymore."

Westin makes a noncommittal noise. He's obviously looking through flight information and is understandably somewhat distracted. "That's good.  And it's no problem, mum," he says agreeably, which is all that Jamie needs to hear. "I can get you in first class on the 22nd under your Natasha Berkov alias.  That one wasn't blown. You'll need to get a wig though; the picture’s got you with a short bob - black."

"Have Sheng see to it, and send the cleaners to the safe house.  He's collecting my things presently," Jamie replies, trying to remember where she's put that particular passport.  She's wired now, but she can feel the crash coming on.  She has to stay awake until Sheng comes back to collect the gun and her clothes.  He'll throw them into the East River and that will be the end of that.

"Will do," Westin replies.  He yawns and she chuckles.  "Do you need anything else?"

"No," she answers, resting her forehead against the window and watching as her breath fogs up the glass when she exhales.  "Go back to sleep, text me the flight details in the morning."

"Okay.  Good night."  The line goes dead and Jamie lets the phone hang a moment longer by her ear, listening to the silence and her own breathing.

She wonders if she's done the right thing, leaving Park's life in the hands of the paramedics that had swarmed all over the building as she'd slipped out the back door.  It was what Watson had wanted, after all, and Jamie's all but destroyed any future that he has in his field of work.

Oddly, it feels like enough.

No one will ever doubt that she's gone soft, and she'll have caught Joan Watson's attention.  Jamie's lip curls upwards, a wicked smirk growing on her lips.  Just as planned.  She's thrown out a gambit, and it's Watson's turn to make a move.

-

Sherlock is asleep, slumped over the end of Joan's bed when she wakes up the next morning.  She blinks sleepily at him and glances towards the clock on the wall.  It's close to two in the afternoon, and Sherlock's boots are dry, as is his pea coat where it hangs on the hook at the back of the door.  He's been here a while.

As she shifts in the bed and sits up properly, Sherlock stirs and blinks sleepily up at her.  "Park made it through surgery," he says, wiping drool from his mouth and scratching at two days of beard growth.  "They're arresting him as soon as he's well enough to be moved out of the ICU."

Joan stares down at her hands.  "Good," she says.  She doesn't know how to feel about that, and a part of her truly wishes that Moriarty had killed him in front of her - a nightmare that could never come back to haunt her.  She doesn't want to know what will come next, or if she'll mentally be able to handle it.

Sherlock reaches out, and he hesitates before he rests his hand on her own.  "I understand, if you need time, Joan.  I cannot imagine what you have been through.  I can give you all the space you need."

It's almost a surprise to Joan when she shakes her head.  She wants to speak to her psychologist about this, yes, but she doesn't want it to define her.  She's seen people like that, shattered by circumstances entirely out of their control.  She's seen Sherlock like that, and she wants to be stronger than that.  "I think I'll be okay," she says uncertainly.  She knows she’s not well enough to make this assessment just yet.  "I won't stop working."

"It's not going to get any safer," Sherlock replies.  He's meeting her gaze and maintaining eye contact.  It's a rarity for him, and Joan finds herself smiling weakly at him.  "Moriarty got away.  They saw her going out the building's back entrance on the CCTV cameras that are set up in the lobby.  They're canvassing the area, but I doubt she'll turn up any time soon.  But she's out there, Joan.  And others like her."  He sighs, and squeezes her hand gently.  "I can't keep you safe."

Somehow, Joan thinks that Moriarty is the least of their worries right now.  She's more concerned that the people who hired Park might seek retribution.  She shrugs.  "We'll take each day as it comes," she says at length.  It's an adage that he's come to know well, and he smiles broadly at her.

"I agree," he says.  He pushes himself to his feet and straightens his t-shirt.  "Your mother is coming at some point," Sherlock says.  "Detective Bell called her this morning and she wants to see you.  You're going to need to give him a statement as well, when you're ready."

Joan has been around police procedure for long enough to know that the waiting period is a courtesy for her, and that it isn't necessary.  She's grateful that Marcus is giving her some space to get her head in the right place before she speaks to him.  "Could we do that... later today... or tomorrow?"

He nods and pulls his phone out of his pocket.  His fingers fly over the keys and Joan tentatively pokes at her arm where they'd given her the tetanus shot.  It's a bit sore still and she raises it and rolls her shoulder in small circles, rubbing at the skin where the shot went in.  It's uncomfortable, but it'll help the soreness.

"Sherlock..." she says quietly, a thought striking her.  He looks up then, his expression carefully blank.  "Moriarty should have killed Park."

He inclines his head to one side.  "She's all but ensured that he will never work again.  His knee is completely destroyed."  He tucks his phone back into his pocket.  "She's eliminated him as a threat to the city."

"Yeah, so she can bring in her own serial killers to do her dirty work," Joan grumbles.  She doesn't know why she's so frustrated by this.  It's thrown her for a loop.  It doesn't make any sense.  Why would Moriarty spare Park's life?  He'd obviously pissed her off to the point where she'd track him down and risk her own re-incarceration in order to have a chance to get him alone.  She'd contacted and worked with Sherlock to get to him too.

"Perhaps," Sherlock replies.  "Her motives, I'm sure, are entirely her own.  It's best not to try and understand that woman, in my experience.  You'll end up hurt."

They're spared discussing it further by Joan's mother sweeping into the room with a duffle bag full of what Joan can only hope are clean clothes and a toothbrush. Her mouth tastes like death.  She lets herself be fussed over and tries not to flinch when her mother speaks Chinese endearments that she'd rather never hear again.  Park had said similar things, choking the life from her in that moment before Moriarty had come in.  He’s taken her mother’s language from her, and Joan doesn’t know how to get it back.

This is going to prove harder than she thought. 

-

Joan is released from the hospital that afternoon just as rush hour traffic is at its peak and she and Sherlock decide to take the subway home as a cab would take twice as long.  Joan tries not to feel too pathetic as she feeds her metro card into the turnstile and catches it on the other end.  She's still a bit weak, and Sherlock is trying to be as helpful possible and it's coming off as almost suffocating.

The ride is silent, and Joan stands pressed between Sherlock and some tired-looking stockbroker who's muttering into his Bluetooth earpiece about how they cannot possibly stomach the loss of the New York market and how there will be consequences to their actions if they back off now.  She tunes him out and stares blankly ahead.

Marcus is waiting for them at the brownstone with food from the Mediterranean place a few blocks up and Joan lets him pull her aside while Sherlock ventures downstairs to locate some plates for them to eat off of.

“Are you okay?” He asks and his eyes are all soft and kind and Joan wants to hug him for being so genuinely concerned over her.  She assures him that she’s fine as they carry the food into the living room.  Marcus sits awkwardly on the couch for a moment before he asks what Joan’s sure he’s been trying to figure out how politely steer the conversation to.  "I have to ask you some questions, Joan," he explains and Joan nods her consent to be spoken to in an official police capacity.  They do this every time Joan or Sherlock has to give a statement to him regarding what they’ve done regarding a suspect, and Joan knows that it’s a formality that must be adhered to. She settles back and watches as Marcus pulls out his notebook and prepares to take notes.

"Did he say anything to you, about why he'd taken you?"  Marcus asks.

Joan thinks about what Park had actually said to her.  "He said that no one ever suspects he's going to kidnap a second victim - that it took him time to warm up and that the second one was the one he savored."  She swallows and then adds, "He said I had friends in high places - I wasn't sure what that meant until Moriarty walked in.  I think she might have tried to call him off through whoever hired him for the first kidnapping."

They both think about this for a beat, Marcus makes a note on his pad.  "I thought that you both had determined that Officer Ling's case had nothing to do with this."

Sherlock comes back in then, plates in hand.  "If the drugs that were being sold in that buy were being distributed by a major organization, it seems fairly logical that someone like Moriarty would be able to determine their origin and deduce the intent of the kidnapper from that.  She’s not stupid by any means."   He offers them both plates and they start to dig through the brown paper containers that Bell has brought.  Joan finds that she's absolutely famished and doesn't talk much throughout the meal, as Marcus and Sherlock go over the particulars of the case.

_It's strange, really_ , Joan thinks, chewing on an overly-lemony bite of potato.  Sherlock isn't prepared to tell Marcus that he relied on Moriarty's help to find her.  From what she's gathered, it was a collaborative effort. She doesn't know if she can lie about it under oath, or what Sherlock will say in court when Park is finally well enough to stand trial.

She's still completely mystified by Moriarty's actions, she doesn't know why she was worthy of Moriarty acting as her personal savoir.  Or why Sherlock was so willing to let her help.  This is obviously a play for something, but Joan cannot figure out what for the life of her.  She listens to Marcus and Sherlock bicker about the merits of Moriarty’s intelligence despite being in jail for several months and therefore out of the loop, an easy smile darting across her face.

After dinner, she writes out a full statement for Marcus and he takes it with a firm handshake and a kind smile.  "You've done more than you know," he says, and Joan hopes that she's given him enough to lock Sonny Park away for the rest of his days.

Sherlock does the dishes and puts the food away and then stands and watches her, leaning against the sink.  "I noticed that you still didn't tell your mother when you going to go home."

Joan smiles at him.  "I told her I felt safer here," she explains.  He seems to swell with pride at that, bending to pick up a dish towel that's fallen onto the ground and hanging it distractedly over the tap.

He doesn't know how to accept what she's offered him, and Joan understands this.  "I'd like to go back upstairs," she says.  Outside there are flakes swirling in what Joan is sure is a bitterly cold wind.  "Do you think you can build a fire?"

He nods and extends his arm.  She takes it and lets him lead her upstairs into the warmth of the living room.  Her book is right where she'd left it, simple paper bookmark tucked into the chapter on women and the media.  She curls up on the couch under the old knit blanket that she's pretty sure is a relic of Sherlock's childhood and opens the book to where she left off, what seems like a lifetime ago.

Written on the bookmark, in a hand she would recognize anywhere, there is a message in blue ink.

_"Every act creates a ripple with no logical end."_

It's a quote that she doesn't recognize, obscure enough that she pulls out Sherlock's spare phone (they still haven't given her back hers - it's in evidence and Joan's a little terrified of how many messages she's going to have when she gets it back) and types it into the search bar.  Her finger hovers over the enter key for a long time before she deletes the whole line of text and sets the phone down.

This isn't for her to understand just yet, it seems.

-

She slips out into the night, taking the keys of the car that Sheng's left with her to handle the last-minute business that she's almost avoiding taking care of.  She's spent the whole of the day sleeping and staring at herself in the mirror and pretending to have a Russian accent.  It's going to be tricky to fly commercial, but it's probably safer than attempting to fly out on a private jet with half the world looking for her.  She's sure that they're actually looking for her now, the distraction of the missing women gone and Park probably still alive.  They have their murderer and kidnapper, and now they can focus their attention on the fugitive once more.

Jamie wants to pretend that she's not interested in whether or not Park survived, but she knows that she'd rather not know just yet.  The urge to slip into his hospital room and inject a bubble of air or some traceless poison into his IV is too great as it is.  She's sure that she could get away with it, which is why she cannot do it.  She chose to leave him alive, a message to any who dare to cross her in the future.

The city is quiet this late at night, and Jamie drives like she doesn’t have a destination in mind.  She does, though, and she ends up parking up the block before she knows it.  The brownstone is dark save a light from the living room.  It’s been left on, no one is awake. 

Breaking into Sherlock's home is far easier than Jamie thinks it should be, especially considering the events of the past few days. The house is quiet and the night is bitterly cold.  The grate has been pulled in front of the fireplace and there are dying embers of fire still glowing a deep orange there.

She moves silently up the stairs and lets herself into Joan Watson's room, standing in the shadows and depositing the borrowed lock picks on the mantle of the fireplace in her room.  There's a glass of water on the floor next to Watson's charging phone. The whole place is incredibly empty feeling and Jamie rather likes that.  Joan is like Sherlock, she has things, but she likes empty space as well.

"Are you going to stand there all night?" a tired-sounding voice asks from the bed.  Jamie steps forward and Watson leans over the side of the bed to switch on the lamp on the floor that was almost invisible in the darkness.

She feels almost at a loss for words, standing in the middle of Joan Watson's room. She plunges her hands into her pockets and shifts from foot to foot as Watson pulls herself into a sitting position, the t-shirt she's sleeping in falling off of one shoulder as she pulls the duvet over her lap.  It's Sherlock's shirt, and Jamie wants to shake her head.  She doesn't understand their relationship.

"I was debating the merits of it," Jamie says at length.  She pulls her hand out of her pocket and gestures to the lock picks on the mantle.  "I brought back your lock picks."

"I could have gotten another set, you didn't need to bother," Watson replies.  She's fiddling with the duvet and Jamie regards her with an impassive expression on her face.  Watson has a question, she knows, and Jamie doesn't know if she's prepared to answer it yet.  That's part of the game.  "Why are you here?"

Jamie steps forward and sits almost gingerly on the foot of the bed, her hand still in the pockets of her jacket.  There are so many answers to the question that she's not sure which will hold Watson's interest the longest.  She settles on what is the simplest, but also the most intriguing.  "I'm leaving town, Watson.  I don't know when I'll be back and I wanted to say goodbye."

Watson stares at her, fingers twisting the duvet and comforter beneath it into knots.  Jamie can feel her shifting, the bed wobbling slightly as she straightens even more.  "Why talk to me, then?  Sherlock's just upstairs."

"He and I have an understanding," Jamie explains.  "Or rather, we reached one devising a plan to get you out of Mr. Park's hands.  He only asked that I make sure you were alive and that you got your lock picks back.  I don't break my promises, Watson."  She lets her expression soften then, and tries to convince herself that it's enough that Watson will notice it.  "I wanted to say goodbye to you."

Jamie finds herself on the receiving end of a look that makes her feel twelve years old and in trouble for defying her mother's wishes once again.  She scowls and looks away, not liking how it feels like Watson can see straight through her.

"Is this all because of what happened before?" Watson asks and Jamie doesn't move or even look up from where she’s picking a pit of lint off of her coat.  "Because I figured you out and was able to beat you?"

"Oh Watson," Jamie says, a genuine smile blossoming across her face.  She leans in, fingers tangling in the duvet next to Watson's hip.  She's far too close to be anything other than intimidating and entirely improper.  "Do you really think you can beat me?"

Their faces are so close that she can see the dark circles under Watson's eyes and Jamie wants to reach out and smooth them out.  She wants to tear Joan Watson apart and see what makes her tick, and she wants a worthy opponent.  She sees a million possibilities in Joan Watson and she wants to explore them all.

And it's Watson who puts on a brave face and leans in even closer to hiss, "Every time."  It's a promise and the game is set.  Match.  Jamie leans forward and presses her lips to Watson's cheek and pushes herself to her feet. Watson's fingers fly up to touch her cheek, a look of utter confusion on her face and Jamie grins at her.

"Until we meet again, Joan," she says, and vanishes off into the moonlit stairwell and out of the brownstone.  She wants to throw back her head and whoop with joy, the game has begun anew.

-

Post -

Joan goes home on Christmas Eve and wakes up on Christmas Morning to find a box deposited at the foot of her bed.  Her mother passes by the half-open door to the guest bedroom and says that it had come overnight with the newspaper before bustling her way down the hallway to wake up Oren.

She stares down at the box, half asleep and still not entirely sure what it could be.  There’s no return address and it’s far too light to be another of Sherlock’s (totally not) hilarious mail pranks.  The postage is interesting; it’s from England, London if she’s reading the postal code correctly.  She hasn’t really had occasion to study them.

Reaching over to her bedside table, Joan grabs her glasses and keys.  She puts on her glasses and turns the package over, sliding her key along the table and watching for any signs that she should be worried.  There are none, and Joan pulls the box open curiously. 

Inside, nestled inside pale blue tissue paper, is a sketch.  Joan stares down at it for a moment, taking in the easy flow of the lines in pencil.  It’s of herself, just a rough likeness of her face and shoulders, but there’s something bewitching about the way that it’s been drawn.  Joan stares down at it, reaching forward with tentative fingers and picking it up.

On the back there is a note, and Joan reads it three times before she realizes she doesn’t understand it at all.

_I finally got it right.  –M._

“Got what right?” Joan mutters to herself, flipping the paper over.  There’s nothing out of the ordinary, and the message doesn’t make sense.  She shrugs, and sets the box and sketch aside.  It’s Christmas Morning and her mother has cooked something delicious-smelling for breakfast.  She can solve the mystery of Moriarty some other time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well this has been fun. Check out that gaping wide-ass open sequel potential. maybe after christmas is over.

**Author's Note:**

> a huge thank you to morning_dew who has taken their time to point out how terrible my timeline is (I have have since hopefully corrected the problem), as well as to send along some really helpful comments regarding my structure and pacing. So thank you, much snaps. :)


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